Police Mix Up Victim’s IDs, Inform Wrong Family of Son’s Death

In an awful case of mistaken identity, police officers in Juneau, AK mixed up two Justin Priests and informed the wrong family that he’d died in a car accident.

Priest’s parents, Karen and Jay, only discovered that their son was alive when they went to inform his girlfriend of Justin’s death early that morning — and Justin answered the door.

“It opens and right here is Justin. I don’t even see it but Jay is sobbing. It doesn’t compute to me. Then I see him,” Karen told the AP. “You want it to be true, but you go, ‘Am I hallucinating?’ Justin didn’t know what was going on.”

Justin, who had woken up to let his puppy out, had no idea “why they were yelling and screaming,” until they eventually pieced the information together: some other Justin Priest had died, and the police had mixed up their identities:

Police wanted troopers to contact the Priest family to find out if the crash victim was their son. The request was unclearly transmitted or misinterpreted, [Chief Bryce Johnson] said, and the officer took the assignment as a death notification.

“We have to take responsibility for that,” Johnson said. “It was our case.”

Making it worse: the trooper had pulled up to the Priest house at 3 AM. “It’s not good when a trooper knocks on your door at three o’clock in the morning,” Karen said.

[AP]
[Image via Shutterstock]

—

>> Follow Tina Nguyen (@Tina_Nguyen) on Twitter

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!