would you know your own relative?

i'm sitting here tonight watching this dateline about this real true life case of mistaken identity, and i am being my typical cynical self, thinking what the f people? how could a hospital and coroner wrongly identify two girls without blood or dna tests or dental records? how could you bury your daughter without looking her? how could you care for a girl for 5 weeks without realizing it was not your daughter?

rewind. do you remember when this happened? i remember very vividly when it happened in april 2006. a group of college kids were coming home from a trip in a school van when a semi sideswiped them, ripping open the van and scattering bodies and their stuff everywhere. several students were killed instantly.

one family, the ceraks, were told that their daughter, whitney, had been among those killed. a second family, the van ryns, learned their daughter laura was alive, but in a coma and in very bad shape. turns out, medical officials had mixed up the two young, blonde, blue eyed girls. the ceraks buried laura's body and mourned whitney, while the van ryns helped the real whitney get well and didn't discover her real identity until over a month later.

here are some things i learned tonight that i just can't believe:

-whitney was thrown 50 feet from the van. but, when medical officials identified laura as whitney, they claimed they did so because her body was found near her purse. clearly laura somehow ended up near whitney's stuff while whitney was thrown clear from the wreckage, or they were simply mixed up in the chaos of the crash. note to emergency professionals: do not rely on stuff to identify people in a multi-person crash. duh.

-the ceraks buried their daughter whitney - really laura - without even looking at the body. a family friend apparently looked at the body, although the ceraks do not know what information was used to identify her to begin with. my thought? they had already identified whitney as laura, and laura was the only one left to be named.

- the van ryns noticed some weird things about "laura," notably that her teeth looked different, her eye color was different, her belly button was pierced, she called her sister "carly" (whitney's sister's name) and, remarkably, referred to herself as whitney. still, they never questioned her identity.

-whitney was ultimately identified by dental records five weeks after the accident, after laura's sister lisa put two and two together and called the ceraks. perhaps that was something that could have been done a bit sooner?

-the coroner did not do any scientific tests on whitney (laura) because the law did not require it. now, indiana law does require such testing.

i'm not trying to be mean. i'm just find it hard to believe that something like this could happen in this day and age. honestly, my heart goes out to these families. i know, had i been in either of their positions i would not have questioned it. if a coroner tells me my daughter or sister has died, i will believe him. it is his job to know. likewise if someone told me my loved one was in a coma.

but were the two women really so similar? did they have the same blood type? same length hair? whitney was taller, she had a belly button piercing, would that tip you off? i think given their emotional state, the van ryns wanted to believe this was their daughter laura, no matter what the evidence told them. they didn't want to believe she could have been killed. they also were not aware that they should have questioned this woman's identity.

what amazes me the most is the compassion and understanding between these two deeply religious families. it would have been very easy for the ceraks to be upset at the van ryns for not identifying their daughter earlier. but what good would that do? acknowledging that whitney was whitney and not laura meant the van ryns had lost their daughter. who would ever want to come to terms with that?

now, the two families are close, and have written a book together. they have not spoken to the press in almost two years, and now they spilled their guts to matt lauer.

and in classic lauer/today show/nbc style, there were a few horrendously cringe-worthy questions. like this one asked to whitney when she finally spoke one hour and 45 minutes into the 2-hour special: now that you know what your parents and sister went through over those five weeks, how does it make you feel? whitney's answer: "it makes me very sad. i try not to think about it."