Grieving parents who thought their daughter had died in a car accident recently found out that she was alive and the girl they had buried was someone else.

Gyeonggi Province police on Wednesday revealed a bizarre case where two teenage victims of a car crash -- one dead and another severely injured -- were mistakenly identified as the other.

According to police, 17-year-old Kim and 14-year-old An were in a traffic collision on March 24 in Goyang City, Gyeonggi Province. Police initially concluded that Kim and the car’s driver had died in the crash.

Kim’s parents held the girl’s funeral service with what was believed to be her body.

Three weeks after the accident, the surviving girl regained consciousness. When the doctors removed the cast covering her face, An’s parents found that she was not their daughter. After regaining her senses, the girl recognized the Kims as her parents.

The confusion was thought to have been caused mainly because the girls’ faces were severely injured to the point of being unidentifiable.

“At the time, both families identified the (dead girl’s) body and An’s parents even looked after the other girl for 20 days, so we could not possibly have thought the girls were switched,” a police official was quoted as saying.

Police have requested a DNA test on Kim and both families from the National Forensic Service.



From news reports
(khnews@heraldcorp.com)