Aaliyah's $68,000 Funeral Tab Unpaid

By Stephen M. Silverman

Tuesday August 13, 2002 01:00 PM EDT

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As the first anniversary of the of death Aaliyah approaches on Aug. 25, a funeral home in the Bahamas that prepared her body and transported it back to the United States for burial is claiming that it has not been paid by Aaliyah's label for its services, reports TIME magazine. (TIME, like PEOPLE, is part of AOL Time Warner.) Loretta Turner of Butlers Funeral Homes and Crematorium in Nassau told TIME that Virgin Records reneged on a verbal agreement to pick up the tab for the R&B singer-actress and the eight others killed in a plane crash after taping the video for her song "Rock the Boat" in the Bahamas. Turner put the bill at $68,000 and said that she appealed to the U.S. Embassy in Nassau for assistance. Robert Spragg, the attorney for Aaliyah's parents, told TIME that Aaliyah's family had been promised that they would be reimbursed for funeral expenses but to date have received nothing. According to TIME, the two executives who allegedly made the promises are no longer with the company. Music site Launch.com identified the executives as the husband-and-wife team of Ken and Nancy Berry, who were the CEO of EMI Recorded Music and vice chairman of Virgin Records America, respectively. As Turner told Launch, "I don't know whether they were terminated or not. I just know that they're no longer with Virgin, so Virgin is not standing by any agreements that they made." A spokesperson for Virgin's parent company, EMI North America, told the music Web site: "It's a terrible tragedy, and because of pending litigation, I cannot comment further."