Woman declared dead after horror car crash found ALIVE in mortuary fridge hours later

By Okorie Chioma - June 2 2018

A woman who was declared dead after a horror car crash was found alive inside a mortuary fridge hours later.

Forensic officers were stunned when they pulled the woman out of the fridge and discovered that was still breathing.

She had been wrongly pronounced dead by paramedics following the crash, which was thought to have killed three people, on a road near Johannesburg, South Africa.

The woman, who suffered severe head injuries, is now in hospital as investigators try to figure out how paramedics made the mistake.

Workers at the mortuary in Carletonville had loaded the crash victims into the fridges and were filling in forms when one went to check on the bodies, it was reported.

A source told Times Select: “When he pulled out the woman’s body, he saw that she was breathing.

“Paramedics are trained to determine death, not us. You never expect to open a fridge and find someone there alive. Can you image if we had begun the autopsy and killed her?”

The woman, from Gauteng province, was rushed to Carletonville Hospital and then transferred to Leratong Hospital in Krugersdorp, where she continued to receive treatment.

The crash happened near Carletonville in the early hours of June 24 when a car went out of control and rolled.

The car was then hit by an ambulance responding to the incident, it was reported.

The woman was declared dead by Distress Alert paramedics, while the two other people in the car were correctly pronounced dead by ER24 paramedics, Times Select reported.

Distress Alert operations manager Gerrit Bradnick told the newspaper: "Thinking about her injuries, how long she lay waiting for the mortuary officials, the trip back to the morgue, then how she would have been undressed, weighed and then put in the fridge ... we are just thankful she is alive.”

He said an ambulance from a different service crashed into the car that had rolled and was in the middle of the road as emergency services responded to the tragic incident.

Mr Bradnick, who responded to the scene, said the crash victims had been ejected from the car and their bodies were found on the ground.

He said he was doing scene safety and the other paramedics had done primary checks on the victims and covered their bodies.

But after the injured were taken to hospital he realised no-one had done any paperwork on the bodies, he said.

The woman had suffered head injuries so severe that the responders could not work out her age or size, Mr Bradnick added.

He insisted his paramedics, who later did paperwork on two of the bodies, had checked for signs of life, including a pulse and breathing, and the equipment they used showed no form of life.

He defended his paramedics' work after the crash and their training, and said the detection of life can be influenced by factors such as cold, alcohol, drugs and injuries.

Describing it as "one of the worst things" that could happen to a paramedic, he said there was no negligence on his employees' part and they did not deliberately declare the woman dead.

A woman who was declared dead after a horror car crash was found alive inside a mortuary fridge hours later.

Forensic officers were stunned when they pulled the woman out of the fridge and discovered that was still breathing.

She had been wrongly pronounced dead by paramedics following the crash, which was thought to have killed three people, on a road near Johannesburg, South Africa.

The woman, who suffered severe head injuries, is now in hospital as investigators try to figure out how paramedics made the mistake.

Workers at the mortuary in Carletonville had loaded the crash victims into the fridges and were filling in forms when one went to check on the bodies, it was reported.

A source told Time Select “When he pulled out the woman’s body, he saw that she was breathing.