Posted on 05/31/2006 10:00:49 PM PDT by SubGeniusX
Grant County - A Taylor University student from Caledonia, Michigan believed to have survived a van crash five weeks ago, is actually dead. The shocking revelation confirmed by the university Wednesday also spells tragic news for a family who believed they were caring for their injured daughter.
“We have some hard news to share with you today,” the family of Laura J. VanRyn said in a web site blog where it had been posting updates on the survivor's condition. “Our hearts are aching as we have learned that the young woman we have been taking care of over the past five weeks has not been our dear Laura, but instead a fellow Taylor student of hers, Whitney Cerak.” The family said a “misidentification” was made at the time of the April 26 accident and that the women shared an “uncanny” resemblance.
“Their body types are similar, their hair color and texture, their facial features, etc.,” the family said.
Cerak, 18, of Gaylord, Mich., is a freshman at the university, while VanRyn, 22, of Caledonia, Mich., was a senior.
Over the past couple of days, as Cerak had become more aware of her surroundings, she had been “saying and doing some things that made us question whether or not she was Laura,” the family said.
(Excerpt) Read more at wzzm13.com ...
http://www.9and10news.com/News/story.asp?StoryID=51550
http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060531/NEWS01/605310382/1001/news
ummmm..... thats one heck of an "oopsie ... my bad"
sad story
And meanwhile Cerak's family was notified that their daughter had, contrary to reports, NOT died. Whatta trip.
Wow that's tough.
I'm so confused. Did the couple not recognize that it was not their daughter? Was her face so badly mangled that they couldn't?
I'm confused... Did your headline state it backwards?
Please don't take this personally, but for both the families involved, and the communities they were involved with, the word "oopsie" seems highly inappropriate. Look at the pictures on the other thread showing how the girls looked alike, realize the damage and deformity done by a head-on collision with a freight truck, and recognize that she has been working her way out of a coma for the past few weeks. It really is a tragedy.
The Star Press, Muncie, Indiana
GANNETT NEWSPAPERS ON THE WEB: They will only allow the posting of titles and links. [Indiana List on FR]
You can see how it happens. A semi hit their van -- with deaths and serious injuries, it must have been a devastating crash. So they copter the women to the hospital where their bloody clothes are cut off and thrown in a pile, or they're picked up by the cops.
Head injuries bleed a lot. With a strong physical resemblence between two patients, it's be pretty easy for the wrong ID to go with each. When one lapsed into a coma and one passed away, without either recovering consciousness, the stage is set for two families to get extremely grim news.
In my military career I had to deal with survivors who wanted to open the casket and confirm that the guy in the box was their guy. If the mortuary people say closet casket, they really mean closed casket, and you NEVER, ever want that sight to be the last thing a wife or son or parent remembers of their husband or daughter.
The situation could have been much worse. Some states encode blood types on ID cards. Imagine if a patient got the wrong transfusion (when I was in military hospital, they tested my blood type even though my voice, my ID card and my dog tags all agreed I was A Positive... I thought they were being boneheaded, now I think I understand why). Imagine if the card was marked for organ donation and the actual decedent's family had strong religious or cultural objections. "Sorry about that, but we noty only sent your daughter to strangers to bury, we parted her out like a rusty Volvo first."
A lot of people will probably flame the hospital for this, but it's a human error. Everything operated with humans will have human errors in it, including hospitals. We've all heard stories about the wrong limb being amputated, etc. I knew a girl who insisted she got the wrong size implants but I think she was just attention-seeking.
Back to the case at hand: if you want to do something useful, pray for the poor girl -- whoever she is, she's not out of the woods yet. Not to mention both families.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
''Cal'donia! Cal'donia!''
''What makes yo' thick head so hard?''
i had the unfortunate experience of having my father parceled out like salvage parts, without our okay, it was devastating when we were told
I lift up these families to God. May they find comfort in their sorrow, and find joy in the one life saved...
May this girl find healing.
That's unfortunate. Some states just do that, assume it's OK, and some people do NOT want it and that wish should be respected.
I believe that some strains of Judaism are dead set against, but I'm not a Jew myself and I don't know for sure. Several of my black friends are against it, and one of their squawks, oddly enough, is they feel that their relatives' or their own bodies would be used for rich white people and not for black people (actually, you're much more likely to tissue-match with someone of the same race). I don't know how widespread that sentiment is in black culture, maybe the people I know who are frank with me are oddballs.
I hope it has been some consolation to you that some parts of your father lived on and gave health, mobility, vision or life to others. But it must have been awful to hear about it afterward.
I bet you have a much better sense of what these families are going through than many of us do.
cheers
-=K=-
I'm thinking the same thing, but I did look at their pics in the Detroit Free Press and they could be twins.
Here is the Blog Laura's sister has been writing. The comments from around the world show how deeply this is affecting everyone. This does hit home as I know some members of the Van Ryn family. They are a strong Christian family and this event will serve to strengthen people's faith and to lead people to Christ.
http://www.lauravanryn.blogspot.com/
I think we'll be going to the memorial service. That's gonna be tough.
Please accept my condolences. I am so sorry. This is truly tragic.
See my post 16.
Actually, not to distract from the tragic topic at hand, but one thing I've noticed about western MI (I'm from southeast MI myself) is that everybody looks alike. Okay, not everybody, but with the preponderance of Dutch / Scandanavian descent there, I'm not surprised at this mixup.
What has become more tragic is that this coroner who helped create the misidentification is planning to step down--good--but not until the end of the year! He needs to leave now so that nobody else suffers from another tragedy. I feel for these families--I live in West Michigan and this tragedy is really hurting people alot.
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