Man discovered alive in body bag after being declared dead

They were dead wrong.

In a scene straight out of a zombie movie, a Brazilian man was discovered awake and breathing in a body bag — five hours after paramedics mistakenly declared him dead.

“The funeral home worker called me, desperately asking me to go there, that my brother was alive,” the victim’s sister Aparecida told Jam Press of the premature death pronouncement, which occurred late last month at the Hospital Estadual do Centro-Norte in Goiano.

The pre-mortem man, Jose Ribeiro da Silva, 62, had been declared dead on November 29 with officials listing the official cause as complications from mouth cancer.

The hospital even handed his family a death certificate.

Aparecida said she received the news at around 8 p.m., whereupon her brother’s corpse was released to the mourning family so they could start preparing the funeral arrangements.

Little did they know, their beloved relative was still very much alive.

From there, da Silva spent a grueling five hours in the body bag as he was ferried from the medical facility to a funeral home, which was located over 62 miles away in the municipality of Rialma.

It wasn’t until 1 a.m. the following day that mortuary workers realized there had been a terrible mistake. A flabbergasted employee had opened the bag to see that the victim’s eyes were open and he was still breathing, albeit with some difficulty, like a reverse scenario of “Weekend at Bernie’s.”

They subsequently alerted emergency services, who took da Silva to the hospital, where he is currently located, while the “dead” man’s family was also informed of the fiasco.

They were appalled over the “horrible” error. “It’s unbelievable what happened, my brother spent five hours in a plastic bag, cold,” lamented Aparecida, who filed a complaint with police on November 30. “Such a situation is totally unacceptable.”

The catastrophe had reportedly occurred after one of the physicians, who had been administering da Silva’s oral cancer treatments, thought he was dead due to a lack of a respiration. However, he had actually been breathing the whole time through a tracheotomy inserted into an incision in the front of his neck.

The doctor responsible has since been released while the hospital’s technical director traveled to Rialma to assist Jose’s family members. Officials have since launched a probe into the pre-mortem mishap.

In a similar calamity in 2020, a Paraguay mother miraculously sprang back to life in a body bag after being pronounced dead by doctors earlier that day.