Suffolk County Police in New York announced that they had opened an investigation after an 82-year-old woman was declared dead by doctors at the nursing home where she lived, but three hours later she was found alive at the funeral home.
According to the police report, the woman was officially pronounced dead at the Long Island Nursing Center last Saturday at 11:15 am. At 13:30 she was taken to the nearby funeral home, and her family members were called to take part in the funeral.
Shortly before the funeral procession began, at 2:09 p.m., the cemetery workers discovered that the woman was still breathing and had a pulse, and rushed to call the medical forces, who quickly transferred her to the local hospital.
The local prosecutor and the police are investigating who is responsible for the misdiagnosis and the determination that the woman died prematurely.
In recent months there have been several cases in which people were declared dead, and were later discovered to be alive. A nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients in the state of Iowa has been fined $10,000 after a 66-year-old woman was pronounced dead, and her body was taken to a local funeral home.
The funeral home staff opened the bag in which the woman’s “corpse” was stored, and found her struggling to breathe and still alive. In this case too, medical teams were called and they took her to the local hospital, but she died two days later in the nursing home.