"As I put my hand on her grave I could hear noises
inside. I heard banging, then I heard her voice. She was screaming for
help"
This is the moment frantic people smashed into a concrete
tomb to help a dead teenager who 'woke up' in a coffin.
Startling footage shows grieving family members smashing
their way into the tomb and wrenching open the wooden casket, after claiming to
have heard 16-year-old Neysi Perez inside.
Relatives claimed they then found the glass viewing window
on her coffin had been smashed and the tips of her fingers covered in bruises.
But despite efforts to revive her medics found no signs of
life and she was later returned to the cemetery and reburied in the same
mausoleum.
Ms Perez, who was three months pregnant, reportedly fell
unconscious after waking up in the night to use the outside toilet at her home
in La Entrada, western Honduras.
It was believed she may have collapsed in an apparent panic
attack after hearing a burst of gunfire.
But when the teenager started foaming at the mouth her
religious parents called the local priest believing she had become possessed by
an evil spirit.
Relatives told how the priest tried to exorcise her, but she
later became lifeless and was rushed to hospital, where three hours later
doctors declared her dead.
Ms Perez was buried in the wedding dress she had recently
used to get married.
A day after her funeral, her husband Rudy Gonzales was
visiting her grave at the La Entrada General Cemetery when he heard banging and
muffled screams from inside the concrete tomb, and raised the alarm.
The footage shows desperate family members breaking through
the concrete block tomb with a sledgehammer, before bringing out and opening up
Ms Perez's coffin to try to revive her.
Mr Gozales told local TV news Primer Impacto: "As I put
my hand on her grave I could hear noises inside. I heard banging, then I heard
her voice. She was screaming for help.
"It had already been a day since we buried her. I
couldn't believe it. I was ecstatic, full of hope."
Cemetery worker Jesus Villanueva said he had also heard
noises coming from the grave.
He said: "I convinced myself that the screams were
coming from somewhere else. I never imagined that there was someone alive in
there.
"That afternoon the girl's husband came to me begging
me to get her out because she was alive. He was hysterical. The family were
soon here and started breaking through the tomb, shouting her name."
Ms Perez was taken by truck to the nearest hospital in San
Pedro Sula, where she was carried in still inside her coffin.
But although medics tried to revive her, all the tests they
carried out showed that she was clinically dead.
Doctor Claudia Lopez recalled: "The whole family rushed
in, almost breaking the door down, carrying the girl in her casket. I told them
to take her out and put her on the bed. Everybody was claiming she was alive so
I went through all the necessary procedures.
"We evaluated and tried everything but the girl was
dead. They put her back in the coffin and took her away again, back to the
cemetery."
Doctors believe Ms Perez may have suffered a severe panic
attack which could have temporarily stopped her heart activity.
Another hypothesis is that the teenager had a cataplexy
attack, an abrupt temporary loss of voluntary muscle function typically
triggered by a strong emotional stimulus such as stress or fear, during which
the victim maintains full conscious awareness.
She may then have died from lack of oxygen after waking up
inside the closed coffin.
Her cousin, Carolina Perez, said: "Once we had taken
her out of the tomb I put my hand on her body. She was still warm, and I felt a
faint heart beat.
"She had scratches on her forehead and bruises on her
fingers. It looked like she had tried desperately to get out of the casket and
hurt herself."
Ms Perez's mother Maria Gutierrez firmly believes her
daughter was buried alive and blames medics for being too quick to sign her
death certificate.
She said: "The doctors declared her dead but everybody
else around me kept telling me she wasn't. She didn't look like she had died.
"Even after a day in the tomb the colour of her body
was normal, her corpse didn't smell, she just looked like she was in a deep
sleep. There was no rigamortis, her body was still flexible, it was impossible
that she had been dead for so many hours.
"We were all so happy. After being declared dead for
such a long time, everybody was saying that she had come back to life. We were
all so happy. I thought I was going to get my daughter back."
Via :
www.mirror.co.uk