26-year-old Fernando de Jesus Diaz Beato was shot 15 times in the Villa Carolina neighbourhood of San Juan on 3 March. Diaz Beato’s family remembered him as a happy and lively person and held a very unusual funeral for him.
As bizarre as it might seem, the funeral had Diaz Beato’s corpse, dressed in his favourite clothes, seated on a chair cross-legged with a cigarette between his fingers. The eyes too were open. It looked as though he was present at his own funeral looking at the funeral attendees. Diaz Beato reportedly loved to sit on a wooden chair in the dining hall and smoke.
“Everybody is really surprised because seeing him like that is like seeing him as if he were alive,” Ihizz Diaz Beato, sister of the deceased said.
“We didn’t want to see him lying in the coffin. We wanted something different. And also, we wanted him to be remembered by his friends and family the same way he was when he was alive,” she added.
