Hair-raising footage has emerged of a family beside themselves with anguish smashing the coffin of a pregnant teen-aged girl, buried after being pronounced dead at the hospital, after allegedly hearing her banging and screaming from inside.
Sixteen-year-old Neysi Perez, laid to rest in her wedding dress, was taken to the nearest clinic while she was still lying in her coffin. But local doctors in Honduras pronounced her dead for a second time, saying there were no signs of life whatsoever.
The newly married teen was two months pregnant when she collapsed at her La Entrada home after waking up one night to use the bathroom, Honduran newspaper La Prensa reported. Unconscious, she started foaming at the mouth, prompting her religious parents to believe she was possessed. A priest reportedly tried to perform an exorcism ritual, but Perez became lifeless and was later declared dead by doctors.
The day after her funeral, her husband, Rudy Gonzales, was visiting her grave when he allegedly heard some screams.
"As I put my hand on her grave I could hear noises inside,” Gonzales told the Primer Impacto TV station. “I heard banging, then I heard her voice. She was screaming for help."
He added: "It had already been a day since we buried her. I couldn't believe it. I was ecstatic, full of hope."
Cemetery worker Jesus Villanueva told Primer Impacto he also heard muffled cries for help coming from the teen's coffin.
"I convinced myself that the screams were coming from somewhere else," he said. "I never imagined that there was someone alive in there."
Getting their hopes up, the family decided to break into the girl's coffin. Startling video footage shows her family members using a sledgehammer to smash their way into the concrete tomb holding her coffin.
The girl's family claims that the glass portion on the top of her coffin was smashed, and the teen's fingertips were bruised, reminiscent of a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movie series, in which a Beatrix Kiddo, a.k.a. The Bride, portrayed by Uma Thurman, manages to escape from a shallow grave after being buried alive.
But unlike in the movie, there was no happy ending for the Honduran teen.
"Everybody was claiming she was alive so I went through all the necessary procedures," doctor Claudia Lopez told Primer Impacto, adding that the family rushed her coffin into the hospital, nearly "breaking the door down."
"We evaluated and tried everything, but the girl was dead," Lopez said.
But Perez's mother still believes her daughter was buried alive, and blames doctors for rushing to declare her dead the first time.
"After being declared dead for such a long time, everybody was saying that she had come back to life," she said. "We were all so happy. I thought I was going to get my daughter back."
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Doctors who examined the girl's body believe she may have suffered a severe panic attack which could have briefly stopped her heart, La Prensa reported. It is also speculated that a cataplexy attack, a temporary loss of voluntary muscle function, may have occurred before the teen was buried the first time.
After she was declared dead a second time, Neysi Perez was reportedly reburied in the same tomb.