Have you all heard about this? (Teens' bodies misidentified)

[UrbScotty]

It made CNN this morning.

(Antrim County, July 14, 2004, 7:05 p.m.) The night before a family attends a funeral for their son killed in a car accident, they find out there has been a mistake: their son is alive and the teenager at the funeral home is his friend.

Patrick Bement's funeral was to be held Wednesday afternoon at Calvary Church. But he is alive in a hospital in Traverse City. Police made a mistake in identifying the victim of the accident. Patrick's friend, Nate Smith, was actually the one killed in Saturday's crash, not Patrick.

Several friends from the Forest Hills area were returning from a visit to a cottage up north and were hit by another vehicle in Antrim County. Smith was killed in the accident and Bement was badly injured, but police misidentified the two teenagers who look similar and notified their families.

<snip>

When Bement's family saw the body at the funeral home Tuesday night, they began having doubts that it was him. After hours on the phone with Nate Smith's family at a Traverse City hospital, the parents insisted police double check who actually died.

"Fingerprints were taken of this particular person of our county at the funeral home. Because we had previous fingerprints of these two young men on file, we were able to check those against the state system and quickly realized that the deceased person locally here at the funeral home was not the person they thought it was," Sergeant Roger Parent of the Kent County Sheriff's Department told 24 Hour News 8.

...

http://www.woodtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2038300&nav=0RcdOmOV

Man, I feel sorry for both families, especially the Smith family. To think that your son has been badly injured in an accident that killed someone is bad enough. To hear that your son was the one who actually died is beyond what I can comprehend at this moment.

[displacedtexan]

1. I saw that news story this morning!

Those two boys really did look alike!

There was something about the family saying they didn't think it was their boy in the morgue, but authorities blamed their grief.

[SheilaT]

2. I hadn't yet heard of this particular case,

but it's something that seems to happen once or twice a year somewhere in the country. It's surprisingly easy to occur, given that the damage done to bodies in an accident is much worse, much more identity-erasing than most of us realize. And if two of the people involved are similar in appearance or build, it becomes more understandable.

I suppose if everyone had DNA on file, and there was a fast field test to establish identity, this wouldn't happen, but I don't see such a thing in the near future, and so these kinds of tragic errors will occasionally occur.