SAT . Husband called wife as he was being crushed to death by concrete burial vault: ‘He told me he loved me’
The father horrifically crushed to death at a Dallas funeral home managed to call his wife while he was still trapped under the burial vault — but only got through to her voicemail to tell her he loved her.
Angel Rojas, 24, first tried calling for help as he was pinned at work — then phoned his wife for a final goodbye.
“He told me he wanted to go home,” widow Natalie Rojas’ recalled to WLBT of the voicemail she heard later. “He told me he loved me and he wanted to go home.”
Rojas was working at the Restland Funeral Home, Cemetery and Crematory on Oct. 20, when one of the massive concrete burial vaults he was tasked with moving to burial sites fell and pinned him to the ground from the waist down.
While in excruciating pain, he used his phone to call for help first — and then immediately called his wife and left her the haunting message.
It took more than 45 minutes to free Angel, which Dallas fire officials said required hydraulic spreaders and air bags — typically used in car-wreck extractions. He was rushed to the hospital where he died later that day.
Rojas took the job at the cemetery to provide for his wife and their son, Angel Noel, who turns 4 next month.
Now Rojas’ family is accusing the mortuary of gross negligence and is considering a lawsuit.
“There’s no way on earth this man should have been operating that machinery alone,” the family’s attorney Matthew Graham told the outlet.
“He shouldn’t had been working alone. He shouldn’t had been moving things of that weight alone.”
