A California man who believed he had buried his son found out 11 days later after the tragic event that his son was alive and that those at the morgue were wrong when they identified the man’s body.
Frank Kerrigan, 82, was called from the morgue and told that the body of a man found behind a store in Fountain Valley was his own son, Frank M Kerrigan, 57. The connection was made because of the problems faced by Frank junior, who suffered from a mental illness, as a result of which, the man lived on the streets.
When the father asked if he needed to identify his son, the morgue employee told him that the identification had already been done with fingerprints: “When someone calls me and tells me that my son is dead and has his fingerprints, I believe him. If he hadn’t been identified by fingerprints, I would have been there in an instant, ” said Frank Kerrigan.
His 57-year-old daughter went to the place where the body was found and left a photo with her son, a candle, and some flowers.
On May 12, the family organized an expensive funeral of about $ 200,000, attended by about 50 people, even from Washington or Las Vegas.
The body of the deceased was cremated, but before that, the grieving Kerrigan looked at the man in the coffin and stroked him, convinced that he was his son. “I didn’t know what my son would look like when he died,” he said.
But 11 days later, Frank was called by a friend, Bill: “Your son is alive! And Bill called my son, who said, “Hi, Dad!”
Forensic officials admitted that they misidentified the body of the deceased, who, in fact, did not use fingerprint recognition technology, but relied on an older photo from a driver’s license.
After the family announced that their son was alive, the morgue used the fingerprints and saw that, indeed, they did not match the deceased.