A crematorium employee in Brazil discovered a 90-year-old woman alive in a body bag after being pronounced deceased.
The shocking discovery of the woman, Norma Silveira da Silva, took place in São José on Saturday.
Da Silva had been placed in a body bag, zipped up, and sent to the morgue where the undertaker who was set to pick her up noticed that she was warm and rigor mortis had not set in.
“When he opened the bag, she was breathing very weakly. And, as she was no longer conscious, she couldn’t ask for help, she tried to breathe and couldn’t,” Da Silva's caretaker and friend Jessica Martins Silvi Pereira told the Brazilian news site NaTelinha.
Pereira told the outlet that Da Silva was in the body bag for nearly two hours, “almost suffocating to death.”
She was quickly sent back to a hospital room and treated.
Unfortunately, Da Silva did actually pass away on Monday morning.
Pereira told Brazilian news outlet Estadão that she had been taken to the hospital in very poor health. She said that her liver had been compromised and she was unconscious throughout the ordeal.
The first death certificate said that she had died from a "urinary tract infection."
The second death certificate reportedly said that she died from "septic shock" caused by "sepsis with undefined focus," according to a translation of the article.
"On Saturday afternoon, I went to visit her and she opened her eyes. She didn't have much stimuli, but she managed to open her eye and saw that we were there," the friend said, according to a machine translation.
Pereira's family is planning to sue the hospital. The Department of Health has also launched an investigation into the incident.
