Body found in July was identified as that of Sharolyn Jackson, the woman who showed up at a mental health facility last Friday
Sharolyn Jackson, 50, showed up at a mental health facility last Friday, surprising relatives who had believed she was dead, reported local television station KYW-TV.
A body found on July 20 on a Philadelphia street had been mistakenly identified as Jackson.
Jackson's mother, Carrie Minney, says the woman in the casket looked just like her daughter, except for the nose. She says the family assumed something had happened to the nose during the embalming process.
A spokesman for the Philadelphia Health Department said Ms Jackson's son and a social worker who knew her viewed pictures of the body and had identified it as being hers.
"There was really a strong resemblance, a really strong resemblance," Minney, 69, said Friday in a phone interview from her home in Trenton, New Jersey. "She looks so much like Sharol they could be sisters."
After Jackson showed up at Pennsylvania Hospital last week, police confirmed her identity through fingerprints. Her son went to the hospital and immediately recognized her.
"He said, 'That's my mom. We made a terrible mistake,'" Garrow said.
Jackson was reported missing around the time that paramedics took a woman who'd been found lying in a Philadelphia street to a hospital, where she died July 20. One of Jackson's sons and a social worker at Horizon House, where her mother said she had been receiving treatment for drug and mental health problems, viewed pictures of the dead woman's body and made the identification.
The medical examiner determined the woman died of heat stroke, signed a death certificate and released the body to the family, Philadelphia Department of Health spokesman James Garrow said.
Ms Jackson's family and friends then mourned her death at a funeral service on August 3.
The body buried in her place will be exhumed in the hope of correctly identifying the remains.
