they zbrierks this may sound horrible and please understand this, how i say this, would it have almost been easier to lose laura the night of the accident than after five weeks of what happened? i don t know. we talk about that a little bit, but losing your child, your daughter, your son, whenever it happens, it s not supposed to happen. in the midst of their grief, there was also dread. what did whitney s family think of them? the families met at the rehab center. shortly after the ceraks were reunited with whitney. i think suzy had some of those feelings of, you know, they re going to hate us and, you know, we ve kept them from their daughter all this time and but it was the look on colleen s face, wasn t it? mm-hmm. comforting? compassion. compassion. she knew she would know exactly how i was feeling at that moment.
and they were somewhat quiet the rest of the evening. that night, after a day with friends, lisa returned to her sister s bedside. her dad had told her about the events of the day. and now lisa looked with fresh eyes. at that moment it was night. i was sitting with her while she was falling asleep and just thinking, wow, this might not be laura and just looking at her and looking at her and still not feel 1g 00% positive, so i felt uneasy on my drive home. lisa turned it all over in her mind the pushed up teeth, the two blue eyes, the piercing that hadn t been there before. and now she had written her name as whitney. how could it be? i remembered that someone in ft. wayne had given us a cd that was played at whitney s funeral.
somehow, the two women s purses and photo i.d.s were switched at the scene. then the survivor was rushed to the hospital. the coroner later acknowledged he d done no scientific tests to confirm the identities of the dead. state law at the time did not require any. and, remember, no member of whitney s family ever asked to see her body. did anybody ask anyone at the hospital how the body was identified? no. no. we didn t. we just assumed that the identifications had been made. why we didn t question anything at that point. but what about laura s family? it s true that whitney and laura shared a superficial resemblance. both were young, blond, attractive. but there were key differences too. the teeth. the eyes. the piercing. and whitney is about four inches taller than laura. how could they not see those
she goes, beautiful as ever. there s a note in the daily medical chart laura van ryn, whitney cerak mistaken identity. a few simple words that can t begin to convey the tide of emotions coarsing through two families, whitney s family from grief to disbelief to joy that their daughter was alive. laura s family, from hope to doubt to the final confirmation through dental records that laura was gone. the hardest thing i ever had to do, matt, was tell my sons that they had lost their sister. and there s not the right words to say in that situation. and, yeah, i mean i just fell to my knees and wept. and expressed to the rest of my family how much i was going to need them. i m just going to need you all to get through this.
do. but i didn t even know if we needed do it at that point. i just said, can i call you back? i ran downstairs. i told my mom, whoever this is, i don t know why they re doing this, but this isn t real. i knew for sure that there was no way that whitney was alive especially because laura s friends are some of my really close friends. they know whitney through me. and even one of my closest friends went and visited, and she s really close with whitney. they never said anything about it. so i knew for sure there was no way it was whitney. nevertheless, at 2:00 a.m., colleen called the family dentist, who agreed to pull whitney s records. schenn she called her husband newell. i know because the edge in her voice that there s something up, and i go my thought immediately i said, not carly! i just said, not carly. thinking that maybe carly had been in some accident.