Sixteen-year-old Neysi Perez was mistakenly buried alive. The teenage girl from Honduras was buried after doctors pronounced she was dead–but her family insist she was buried alive. Perez apparently woke up in her coffin, only to die before she was freed.
A day after Neysi Perez’s funeral, her husband, Rudy Gonzales, was visiting the gravesite when he heard screams and banging from inside the coffin. He spoke to 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.”
Footage shows frantic relatives smashing into the concrete tomb of recently buried Perez.
Perez, sixteen, had been three months pregnant, and apparently fell unconscious when she heard a burst of gunfire near her home in La Entrada, western Honduras. The teen began foaming at the mouth, leading her religious parents to believe she was “possessed”. After a priest attempted to perform an exorcism, Perez was rushed to hospital when she became lifeless and was soon pronounced dead by doctors three hours later. She was buried wearing her wedding dress.
Mr Gonzales was visiting his wife’s grave twenty-four hours after her funeral, when he says he heard screaming coming from inside the tomb. By the time relatives and cemetery workers were able to break through the concrete and transport Perez, still in her coffin, to the hospital, it was too late. Medics again pronounced her dead.
Doctors believe Ms. Perez may have suffered a severe panic attack from the gunfire 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. Perez was later reburied in her original grave.
Maria Gutierrez, Perez’s mother, believed her daughter was buried alive, and blamed doctors for being too quick in signing a death certificate. “She didn’t look like she had died,” Ms Gutierrez said.
The footage below shows desperate family members breaking through the concrete block tomb with a sledgehammer, before bringing out and opening up Neysi Perez’s coffin to try to revive her.
