Woman Declared Dead After Car Accident Found Breathing in Morgue Fridge
Famous literary horror writer Edgar Allan Poe was famous for putting his fear of being buried alive into his terrifically terrible short stories. Most people remember how the subject featured prominently in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but it was far from the only yarn it featured in.
I’m sure that Poe would’ve shivered to read the latest news out of South Africa. It started with a fatal car crash that occurred on June 24 in the Gauteng province.
Three people perished — or at least paramedics believed that they had. Two of fatalities stayed stone-cold dead.
But the outcome proved quite different with the third individual, a woman. Paramedics from the Distress Assist ambulance service examined her thoroughly and concluded that she didn’t have any vital signs.
So they slotted her body into a mortuary fridge. Distress Alert operations manager Gerrit Bradnick told TimesLIVE, “Equipment used to determine life showed no form of life on the woman.”
But it turned out she was far from dead. When a staffer checked on the body during the form-completion process “and pulled out the woman’s body, he saw that she was breathing.”
Bradnick was quick to say that “this did not happen because our paramedics are not properly trained. There is no proof of any negligence by our crew.”
The woman’s family, though, seemed less convinced. “As a family, we won’t talk about this unless the police, paramedics, and the mortuary officials who were involved are present,” a family member explained to the BBC.
“We need answers. The issue is that we need answers, that’s all we want and we don’t have any clarity now.”
While the woman’s name hasn’t been released to the public, she isn’t the only individual to experience such a grisly mix-up.
This past January, a Spanish prisoner who authorities had planned to autopsy woke up mere hours before the procedure.
Another South African from KwaZulu Natal was similarly thought to have died in a traffic incident, but he was later found breathing. Sadly, he died mere hours later.
The confusion around the woman’s state has understandably upset her loved ones. However, it also represents a new lease on life, the flowering of hope once withered.
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