Background: News footage of the urn that was expected to incorporate the cremated remains of Shanice Crews (WROC). Inset: Shanice Crews (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System).
A New York pistillate who went missing and was purportedly recovered dormant turned up alive — successful different state.
According to WROC, a CBS affiliate successful Rochester, the household of 31-year-old Shanice Crews was told that their loved 1 was found dead successful the outpouring of 2024. The cause, according to the Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office, was a cocaine overdose. Authorities told Crews’ household that they judge she had died that February. Her remains were cremated and mixed with the remains of the household matriarch, distributed among the household successful jewelry that fto them transportation the ashes of their departed relatives with them.
But Shanice Crews was really alive, and residing successful Michigan.
Crews’ sister Shanita Hopkins, whose property was not provided, spoke to WROC astir the unusual communicative and invited the outlet into her home, wherever she kept an urn that she had believed held the ashes of her precocious sister.
Hopkins told the presumption that months aft her household held a memorial work for Crews, she received a substance connection retired of the bluish from a pistillate she didn’t know. It included a representation of a precise acquainted pistillate and read, “Ma’am I’m acrophobic your sister is not dead. She conscionable volunteered astatine my lawsuit today.”
Hopkins identified the pistillate arsenic Shanice Crews. She told WROC that she instantly called the police, who referred her to the aesculapian examiner’s office. Authorities attempted to reassure Hopkins that the dental records from the assemblage they had identified arsenic Crews were a lucifer — but Hopkins was not convinced. The adjacent measurement was matching DNA.
“They wanted my youngest sister, due to the fact that her and Shanice has the aforesaid ma and dad, and past they wanted her son,” Hopkins explained. “So, some of them went and they did a DNA test, and erstwhile the results came back, they said it wasn’t a lucifer [for the remains].”
Even much questions followed. Hopkins told WROC, “We dealt with the ashes and stuff. We enactment them successful necklaces and we mixed my ma with this stranger.”
The Monroe County Medical Examiner told WROC successful a connection that they were “unable to remark connected circumstantial cases.” Hopkins said that the bureau has since reclaimed the ashes that were erstwhile believed to beryllium to Crews.
WROC reported that neither the outlet nor Crews’ household person been capable to get successful interaction with their loved one, whom they haven’t seen since they reported her missing successful July 2021. Hopkins told WROC, that if she could speech to her sister, she would archer her, “I emotion her.”
She continued, “I’ve been aggravated for … I’m inactive angry. I don’t deliberation I’m ever gonna get implicit the anger, but I cognize however it feels … I cognize however it feels to deliberation that she was dead, and that, I conscionable privation her to cognize that. I conscionable privation her to cognize that immoderate we had going on, it doesn’t adjacent matter. Like, I emotion her, that’s it. That’s each I would privation her to know.”