A Spanish man declared dead by three different doctors woke up just moments before medics were scheduled to begin harvesting his organs.
Gonzalo Montoya Jiménez, 29, who was was serving time for robbery, was on the morgue table covered in scalpel lines in preparation for an autopsy, just before he regained consciousness.
People.com reports: His snoring, apparently, tipped doctor’s off to the fact that he was not a corpse.
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“I can’t comment on what happened at the Institute of Legal Medicine,” a spokesperson for the Spanish Prison Service told members of the media, “but three doctors saw clinical signs of death so it’s still not clear at the moment exactly why this occurred.”
After Jiménez failed to show up for roll call on Jan. 7, he was found slumped over on a chair in his jail cell. He was pronounced dead at the scene, placed in a body bag and sent to the hospital for an autopsy.
Hospital officials told local newspapers in Spain that the man’s false death could have been the result of catalepsy, a condition in which a body goes rigid and loses consciousness, mimicking death.
It’s associated with epilepsy, which Jimenez’s reportedly suffers from.
Although he’s in the intensive care unit at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Oviedo, he’s in stable condition. According to reports, the once-thought-to-be-dead man spoke about of his wife and daughter when he regained consciousness.
A similar incident occurred during the Ebola breakout in 2014. A victim of the disease was being wrapped in plastic by a burial team when he suddenly moved his arm. The chilling incident was caught on camera by ABC’s Good Morning America crew.
