Sisters Take Their Brother Off of Life Support Only for Him to Show Up ALIVE While They Made Funeral
If this isn't one of the craziest things we've ever heard. . .
On May 13, Rosie Brooks got a call from Mercy Hospital in Chicago. This was the call that EVERYONE dreads. The social worker on the line told her she was looking for relatives of Alfonso Bennett. Brooks told the woman on the line that Bennett was her brother and was then told that he was in the hospital in the ICU.
Brooks, like most of us, gathered herself, and her sister Brenda Bennett-Johnson, and made a bee-line to the hospital. When they got there, they saw a man who the hospital and were shocked at what they saw.
The man had tubes in his mouth and nose, he had been beaten beyond recognition but the most troubling fact was. . . Brooks didn't believe the man to be her brother.
Hospital representatives told the sisters that their brother had been brought in as a "John Doe" on April 29 and had since been positively identified by the Chicago Police Department.
Via Chicago CBS:
"Their brother has a background and is rarely in touch with his four sisters. Bennett-Johnson said a nurse told her police identified him through mugshots and not fingerprints because of budget cuts.
“You don’t identify a person through a mugshot versus fingerprints,” Bennett-Johnson said. “Fingerprints carries everything.”
The sisters said the man responded to commands by raising his hand but never opened his eyes. Soon he started to languish.
The sisters signed papers to take him off a ventilator and gave permission for doctors to perform a tracheotomy. He went into hospice.
Bennett-Johnson was with him.
“Within minutes he was ice cold,” she said.
They purchased a casket and a suit and made funeral arrangements.
Around the same time they received a phone call from one of their other sisters."
Their sister Yolanda called Bennett-Johnson shouting "It's a miracle, It's a miracle!" Their brother had just walked through her front door!
If that ain't some ish!
“It’s sad that it happened like that. If it was our brother and we had to go through that, that would have been a different thing,” Bennett-Johnson said. “We made all kinds of decisions on someone that wasn’t our family.”
The sisters said the man they’d been caring for was later identified at the morgue through fingerprints. They said police are now looking for his family.
“I can’t conceive of how a budgetary issue would drive whether or not a person who was a John Doe would be fingerprinted before they’re taken off of life support,” said family attorney Cannon Lambert Sr. “If that’s the situation, something’s got to be done.”
Of course the CPD has launched it's own internal investigation to find out how this case of mistaken identity got this far. When contacted, Mercy Hospital stated only that "the family had positively identified the man as their brother" which, the sisters said they never did.
We've also learned that police only take fingerprints when a person commits a crime or is taken to the morgue, which ultimately happened in this case but not before Bennett’s family had to go through this very unusual situation.
