It was every parent's nightmare. In 2010, Sergio and Maria Guerra got a call from Arizona law enforcement. The mother and father were told their 20-year-old daughter, Abby Guerra, was killed in a rollover car accident while she was driving back from a trip to Disneyland.
The family identified their daughter. They started making funeral arrangements. Six days later, a medical examiner reviewed the two girls' dental records.
The examiner discovered it was a case of mistaken identity. This isn't the first time police made such a mistake. Whitney Cerak and Lauren Van Ryn experienced a similar mishap after they were in a car accident.
The young woman at morgue was Abby's best friend, Marlena Cantu. Abby had been in the ICU the entire time with Marlena's family.
Neither the Cantus nor the Guerras knew they had the wrong daughter since the best friends look strikingly similar and were both badly bruised.
"I was planning for a funeral myself, paid for everything," Maria says in the video below. "Friends, family, people coming from out of state. It was really, really sad and then suddenly they said, ‘Oh, we made a mistake. She's alive.'"
While it was good news for the Guerra family, it was a devastating blow to the Cantus. Sergio could barely keep himself together, ecstatic that his daughter was alive, but knowing exactly how the Cantu family felt.
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