Mourners at the wake of an elderly Ecuadorean woman were startled to discover she was still alive.
A hospital doctor in the city of Babahoyo declared Bella Montoya, 76, dead following a suspected stroke.
She was placed in a coffin and taken to a funeral parlor, where relatives held a vigil before her planned burial.
When, after almost five hours, they opened the coffin to change her clothes ahead of the funeral, the woman gasped for air.
“My mum started to move her left hand, to open her eyes, her mouth; she struggled to breathe,” her son Gilbert Balberán described when he realized his mother was still alive.
Minutes later, firefighters arrive and lift Bella Montoya from the coffin onto a stretcher and take her back to the same hospital where she had been declared dead.
Ecuador’s health ministry has set up a committee to investigate the incident.
In February, an 82-year-old woman was found to be breathing while lying in a funeral home in New York state. She had been pronounced dead three hours earlier at a nursing home.
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