When family members attended Sharolyn Jackson's funeral and burial August 3, some noted that her nose looked thinner, the Associated Press reports. They, however, figured something happened during the embalming process. But they were wrong.
The truth is far stranger: The woman they buried that day was not, in fact, their loved one but a lookalike. Jackson showed up at a Philadelphia hospital on Aug. 16, several weeks after she had been reported missing and 13 days after her family thought they had laid her to rest at Colonial Memorial Park in Hamilton, N.J.
"There was really a strong resemblance, a really strong resemblance," [Jackson's mother, Carrie] Minney, 69, said Friday in a phone interview from her home in Trenton, N.J. "She looks so much like Sharol they could be sisters."
Jackson was reported missing around the time that paramedics took a woman who'd been found lying in a Philadelphia street to a hospital, where she died July 20. One of Jackson's sons and a social worker at Horizon House, where her mother said she had been receiving treatment for drug and mental health problems, viewed pictures of the dead woman's body and made the identification.
Read more at the Associated Press.