In a terrible mistake, the SF Medical Examiner's office informed a woman that her father had passed away; they had the wrong person.
For three years after holding a service for her purportedly deceased father, and carrying his ashes with her in remembrance, Kylie Robinson found out her father was alive. No miracle, but a mistake at the Medical Examiners office left her carrying ashes, instead of looking for her father to help him.
According to the Chronicle, Kylie got a call on May 9, 2021, from the medical examiner's office informing her that her father was found dead in a hotel room; the Chronicle reported that it was a single-room occupancy hotel. She was told she had a limited amount of time to pay for cremation and burial services, and she posted a GoFundMe to help pay for "a proper funeral to celebrate his life and all the wonderful memories we shared with him."
She had the body cremated and hosted a funeral a couple weeks later. "We spent 3 years grieving and mourning the loss of our dad," she wrote on a new GoFundMe campaign page. "Taking his ashes with us everywhere."
Two months ago, Kylie said, a close friend ran into her father in San Francisco. When she called the medical examiner's office to inquire, Kylie said she learned her father had never been fingerprinted. The office sent her a photograph of her father's body and the unthinkable was true: It was not her father, she wrote. The ashes she had been toting around were not her father's, and she said it remains unknown whom the ashes actually belong to.
SF Gate
Also in the article, the Police had at least one opportunity to straighten this out over the three years.
He was arrested by officers of the San Francisco Police Department in November 2022 but released when records "indicated he was dead," the paper reported.
Previously:
• Medical examiner quits after declaring that bloody, stabbed corpse had died of 'natural causes'
