Mexican Baby Comes Back to Life Inside Coffin

(Aug. 6) -- A Mexican baby that had been pronounced dead was discovered to be still breathing -- just hours before she was scheduled to be buried.

Dafne Marisol Hernandez, 17, was preparing to say farewell to her daughter, who died not long after her premature birth this week.

To Hernandez's surprise, she could hear noises coming from inside the coffin. When she opened it up, she saw that her baby was alive -- and crying.

Dafne Hernandez shows the death certificate of her newborn daughter and a coffin meant to be used at her burial

Organizacion Editorial Mexicana / AP

Dafne Marisol Hernandez holds up the death certificate for her baby daughter. The infant was pronounced dead soon after her birth, but she was heard crying in her tiny coffin.

"That was when we realized she was alive," Hernandez told the Reforma news agency. "There were movements and noises from inside the box where she had placed to be buried."

It seems the odds for the baby were stacked against her from the beginning. Hernandez was rushed to hospital in Pachuca, northeast of Mexico City, when her water broke. She was only 24 weeks pregnant. Doctors took a blood sample and told her that they would have to induce labor; otherwise her life would be in danger.

When the baby was born, she weighed only 1.3 pounds. Soon after, doctors declared that the baby had died, saying they could no longer detect a pulse.

The case is "very strange and inexplicable," Adolfo Martinez, director of the hospital, told news agency EFE. "We don't know exactly when the heart and lung function returned."

Just as strange is the fact that such a weak child could survive being declared dead. Once the death certificate had been signed, the baby was taken to an ice-cold mortuary.

She was left there for more than four hours before being given back to the family.

"We know that premature babies can't take even a minute of cold conditions, let alone the temperature of a morgue," Martinez said. "It's not normal that she survived."