A young Detroit woman has been found alive at a funeral home hours after she was mistakenly declared dead and shipped there by her grieving family.
Timesha Beauchamp is now in critical condition on a ventilator in hospital after she was found unresponsive in her apartment Sunday morning by her family and pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics, WXYZ reports.
The 20-year-old, who has special needs, was sent to the James H. Cole Funeral Home after emergency workers were unable to resuscitate her.
(Family Handout)
Yet mortuary workers about to embalm the body were to make an astonishing discovery – the woman was still breathing.
“While it is our practice not to comment on open investigations, we can confirm that on Sunday, August 23, 2020, we received a call to pick up a Southfield woman who was deceased,” the funeral home said Monday in a statement to ABC.
“Upon her arrival at the funeral home, our staff confirmed she was breathing and called EMS.”
“They were about to embalm her which is most frightening had she not had her eyes open. They would have begun draining her blood to be very, very frank about it,” Attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who has been hired by Beauchamp’s family, told WXYZ.
Paramedics had tried to revive the woman after she was found lifeless at her home in the Detroit suburb of Soutfield at around 7.30 a.m., Southfield Fire Chief Johnny Menifee told the outlet.
“The paramedics performed CPS and other life-reviving methods for 30 minutes,” Menifee said. “Given medical readings and the condition of the patient, it was determined at that time that she did not have signs of life.”
As no foul play was involved, the Southfield Police Department simply informed the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s Office of the findings. An on-duty forensic pathologist at the coroner’s office then released the body to the woman’s family so that they could arrange for it be picked up by a funeral home of their choice.
However, later that day the funeral home called the fire department to tell them the woman was still alive.
“They did the normal medical interventions and that’s when the funeral home told them that she was to be embalmed and all that,” Detroit Fire Department Deputy Commissioner Dave Fornell told ABC. “It kind of surprised us. We couldn’t believe it.”
“I talked to our medical people and they said she was breathing, she had a decent heart rate, she had decent blood-oxygen,” Fornell said. “But she was definitely alive when we got there.”
Fieger, the family’s attorney, said the 1.5 hours Beauchamp lost by being wrongly sent to the funeral home instead of a hospital may have a critical impact on her chances of recovery.
“What did this delay do in terms of Timesha’s health for the rest of her life,” he told WXYZ.