The television channel said that Southfield Fire Department paramedics had on Sunday morning been called to an unresponsive woman, Timesha Beauchamp, 20, who, the fire chief said, was not breathing when they arrived. After about half an hour of standard efforts to revive the woman, she was pronounced dead.
"They were about to embalm her which is most frightening had she not had her eyes open. They would have begun draining her blood to be very, very frank about it. It’s one of people's worst nightmares to imagine having an ambulance called and instead, sending you off to a funeral home in a body bag," Attorney Geoffrey Fieger, hired by Beauchamp's family, said.
"The funeral home unzipping the body bag, literally, that’s what happened to Timesha, and seeing her alive with her eyes open," Fieger said.
The fire chief said there had been no indication of foul play, so the Oakland County Medical Examiner's Office had been contacted and given the medical data.
"The patient was again determined to have expired and the body was released directly to the family to make arrangements with a funeral home of their choosing,” the chief said.
However, Beauchamp was found breathing a few hours later by the James H. Cole funeral home's staff. Now the woman is in critical condition on a ventilator at Sinai Grace Hospital.