Imagine receiving the ashes of your deceased family member, spending time grieving them and realising they’re gone... only for them to suddenly appear alive.
Sounds like waking up from a bad dream, right?
Well, it was real life for this lad who found out he was well, supposed to be dead.
On 11 September 2023, Tyler Chase was declared dead from a drug overdose.
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The 23-year-old had been living in a recovery program for many months after struggling with substance abuse.
The American hadn’t had contact with his family for years and had been on the streets.
And then, the next thing his family knows, a death certificate and urn of his ashes were sent to them. Only they weren’t actually his.
Chase was actually out living his life when he realised his food assistance benefits were no longer active. And in October, he was shocked to learn it was because he was allegedly ‘dead’.
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Unsurprisingly, the employees at the Department of Human Services were baffled to see this Oregon man ‘back from the dead’.
“They were like, ‘Can we see your ID?’ So, I gave it to them,” Chase told Portland Fox affiliate KPTV. “Then they just looked as confused as I was, and they’re like, ‘Right here it says you are dead.’”
Turns out, a man was found dead back in September with Chase’s wallet and temporary driver’s license on him – which has his name on, but no photo.
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So, the Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the man as Chase.
The office then notified his family of his assumed death and on the 1 October, the body was cremated.
Officials reckon the bloke they though was Chase, stole the real Chase’s wallet at an addiction recovery centre where they were both staying.
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Chase said: “So, they find a paper ID of me that’s smudged and everything and they were like ‘that’s Tyler John Chase,’ so they put him down as me.
“And then they notified the family like protocol.”
Obviously it was a bit of a shocker for the family as one of his cousins told KGW he ‘lost it’.
Latasha Rosales said: “It is so hard to believe how something like this could even happen. It just makes no sense to me.”
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A county spokesperson said in a statement: “We deeply regret that the misidentification happened.”
And now, there’s been a change in the protocols at the Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“Going forward, all individuals who are found with a temporary state-issued identification must also have fingerprints submitted for positive identification, to ensure that this will never happen again.”
Jess Battison