'Corpse' found alive in funeral parlour

A 68-year-old man was mistakenly declared dead and refrigerated for five hours at a funeral parlour before a worker noticed he was alive, a Bordeaux hospital said today.

The man has since died.

The unidentified man, in the final stages of cancer, was declared dead on Friday at a nursing home near the southwest city of Bordeaux. A doctor called to the home issued a death certificate.

The body was then sent to a funeral parlour in nearby Macau, where it was refrigerated for five hours. An employee at the funeral parlour was preparing the body for burial when he discovered signs of life.

“When I ... opened the cover, I saw that his stomach was moving,” said Laurent Besson on France-2 television.

“I don’t deny that I jumped.”

The man was transferred to the Bordeaux University Hospital and placed in intensive care, where he died on Sunday night, according to the hospital statement.

The head of the hospital’s legal medicine department, Sophie Gromb, said that such errors, while rare, are not totally improbable.

“A person can experience respiratory pauses, and if there’s no pulse at the time, the subject could be declared dead,” she said. “The law says you can’t bury someone within 24 hours of his death, precisely to avoid burying people alive.”

The identity of the doctor who signed the initial death certificate was not made public.

Police in the Gironde region said the man was terminally ill with throat cancer but that the cause of death was still undetermined.

It was unclear what, if any, role the refrigeration may have had in hastening the man’s death. An autopsy was to be performed today to determine the cause of death, said deputy prosecutor Jean-David Cavaille.

“For now, there is nothing suspicious,” he said. “But we’ll decide whether there was a medical error or a punishable infraction based on what we find.”

Prosecutors also have launched a procedure regarding the civil status of the deceased, since two death certificates were issued in his name.

A spokeswoman for the Clos Lafitte nursing home said: “We not hiding anything. All the facts connected with this case have been relayed to the police.”