It’s one of those nightmarish situations when you dream about waking up in a body bag. But this time for Timesha Beauchamp it was real. Just minutes before they were going to embalm her at the James H. Cole funeral home in Detroit she opened her eyes. And if it hadn’t been for that they would have started the process of embalming, while she was alive.
According to reports they are trying to figure out exactly where the medical professionals went wrong. The Southfield fire department was called out to a home where a 20 year old woman was unresponsive. The paramedics tried to revive her for 30 minutes and consulted an emergency room doctor.
Instead of the doctor examining her himself they had pronounced the patient dead based on the information provided at the scene. She was then taken to the James H. Cole funeral home. The Oakland County medical examiner’s office released the body without an autopsy.
More than an hour later the funeral home confirmed that she was breathing and called in an emergency medical crew. When they unzipped the body bag she opened her eyes and was still breathing. “Our staff confirmed she was breathing,” said the funeral home.
The mother was rightly upset about the entire ordeal saying, “My heart is so heavy. Someone pronounced my child dead, and she’s not even dead,” which she told to WDIV-TV.
The family has hired a lawyer named Geoffrey Fieger who had this to say, “They were about to embalm her, which is most frightening, had she not had her eyes open. … The funeral home unzipping the body bag — literally — that’s what happened to Timesha, and seeing her alive with her eyes open.”
According to Southfield they are conducting an internal investigation but they are also insisting that both fire and police deptartments had followed procedures.
