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.
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
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.
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.