Reply #9: This happened before, in 2006

[Ruby the Liberal]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-01-vanryn-cerak-cover_x.htm

Photos at link.

Whitney Cerak and Laura VanRyn looked remarkably alike. But so much alike that a coroner investigating a traffic accident could confuse one, who died, with the other, who lived? That Laura's family could tend the injured Whitney for five weeks before realizing that she was not their daughter? "It's just so unbelievable," Whitney's grandfather Emil Frank said of a case of mistaken identities that left one family and one hometown exultant; another family and another town crushed; and a shaken coroner concluding that he's not cut out for the job.

"We're so elated," said Joe Duff, manager of Whitney's hometown of Gaylord, Mich., upon learning that Whitney, and not her fellow college student Laura, had survived a highway wreck. "But the community's kind of torn because there's another community and another family that's going through exactly the kind of terrible loss that we went through."