A funeral home worker found a woman breathing 2 hours after she was declared dead, official says

A 74-year-old Nebraska woman who had been pronounced deceased was found breathing as she was placed on a table at a funeral home, a sheriff’s official says.

When a Nebraska woman in a nursing home was declared dead by staff members there on Monday, authorities were not called. She had been in hospice care, the last step before death for many, so she didn’t meet the guidelines that would require a coroner to be dispatched, a sheriff’s official said. But two hours later, the woman who some thought had taken her last breath was found not to be a corpse, as an employee at a Lincoln funeral home spotted signs of life. “This is a very unusual case. I’ve been doing this 31 years and nothing like this has ever gotten to this point before,” Lancaster County sheriff’s Chief Deputy Ben Houchin said in a Monday afternoon news conference. Constance Glantz, 74, was breathing as funeral home workers readied to prepare what they thought was her corpse just before midday Monday, Houchin told reporters. Staff at The Mulberry nursing home in Waverly, just northeast of Lincoln, had pronounced Glantz dead at 9:44 a.m., Houchin said. What was then thought to be Glantz’s lifeless body was taken from the nursing home to the Lincoln funeral home, Houchin said. As funeral home staff were placing Glantz on a table “to start their process,” an employee noticed that she was breathing, according to Houchin.