Product Description

Meet Laura Van Ryn and Whitney Cerak: one buried under the wrong name, one in a coma and being cared for by the wrong family.

This shocking case of mistaken identity stunned the country and made national news. Would it destroy a family? Shatter their faith? Push two families into bitterness, resentment, and guilt?

Read this unprecedented story of two traumatized families who describe their ordeal and explore the bond sustaining and uniting them as they deal with their bizarre reversal of life lost and life found.

And join Whitney Cerak, the sole surviving student, as she comes to terms with her new identity, forever altered, yet on the brink of new beginnings.

Mistaken Identity weaves a complex tale of honesty, vulnerability, loss, hope, faith, and love in the face of one of the strangest twists of circumstances imaginable.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3646 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In a widely reported incident in 2006, Laura Van Ryn and Whitney Cerak, students at an evangelical college in Indiana, and their families were victims of a ghastly mistake: the wrong girl was identified as the survivor of a car crash that claimed multiple lives. Only after five weeks, when the girl emerged from a coma, was the error discovered. The families and the survivor, Whitney, record their experiences in this heavily Christian account. Those seeking a tale of extraordinary emotions to match the extraordinary circumstances will be disappointed: both families are devoutly religious, and their faith is of the sort that does not admit a great range of feelings. Anger and anguish are quickly recast as professions of faith and celebrations of life in Christ. The Van Ryns immediately embrace Whitney and dismiss a reporter's suggestion of lawsuits. Nor are the Ceraks bitter, not even Whitney, who suffers brain damage. As they describe it, the story inspires others to adopt their beliefs. (Because of such conversions, Whitney writes that the five people killed in the crash have given their lives for Christ.) Readers who don't share the authors' faith may feel alienated, however much they admire the fortitude of the families.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
The Cerak family -- Newell, Colleen, Carly, Whitney and Sandra Sepulveda -- lives in northern Michigan, where Newell is a youth pastor and Colleen is a PE teacher and coach.

Carly graduated from Taylor University and has lived in Africa for the last six months starting a new ministry to street kids.

Sandra took a year from Grand Valley State University and joined with Invisible Children to bring awareness of the plight of children in Uganda. She is currently back at GVSU finishing her nursing degree.

Whitney is now a junior at Taylor University majoring in psychology. She is confident in God's healing and the revelation of the Holy Spirit in her life.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Colleen Cerak woke up with a start to the sound of the phone ringing. Her eyes could barely focus as she tried to make out the alarm clock on the nightstand. It was nearly two in the morning, Wednesday, May 31. When she finally reached the phone, she thought she recognized the voice on the other end as a man identified himself as the Grant County coroner. The same man had called five weeks earlier, telling her that Whitney, her eighteen-year-old daughter, had died in an accident along with three other Taylor University students and a university employee. That call also came late at night. Why would the coroner call me in the middle of the night now? she wondered.

"The county chaplain is monitoring this call," the coroner told her. Then he asked what struck Colleen as a very strange question. "Are you alone?"

"What? Yes. I mean no," she said. "Carly, my daughter, is home with me."

"Would you please ask her to listen in on this conversation?"

If she hadn't been so asleep, Colleen might have asked why it mattered if she were alone, and why the coroner had called at such an ungodly hour. But she didn't. Her body was awake, but her mind hadn't caught up with it yet. She climbed out of bed, walked across the hall to Carly's room, and woke her up. "I need you to listen in on this call. I'm going downstairs to get the other phone. Don't hang up," Colleen said.

Carly was sound asleep when her mother threw the cordless phone on her bed. "What? You want me to do what? Why?" Carly asked, but Colleen had already started down the stairs. Half asleep, but already panicking, Carly put the phone to her ear. She listened as her mother asked the man to identify himself again. The moment she heard him say he was the coroner, Carly felt sick to her stomach.

"We now know," the coroner said, "that the accident survivor in the hospital identified as Laura Van Ryn is not in fact Laura. This fact was confirmed earlier this evening through her dental records."

Carly listened upstairs while Colleen was downstairs on the main extension. Neither of them said a word, their minds unable to comprehend what they were hearing. Then the coroner dropped his bombshell. "We have reason to believe your daughter may be alive."

"No. No. That's impossible. We buried her," Colleen said. In her half-awake state, she thought the coroner was saying that Whitney had been alive when she was placed in her casket, meaning the family had buried her alive. The thought horrified her. The coroner quickly clarified what he meant. "We have reason to believe that the girl identified as Laura Van Ryn is, in fact, your daughter Whitney Cerak."

The moment Carly heard the coroner say that Laura was Whitney, she threw down the phone and stormed down the stairs. "No, no, no!" she screamed. "Hang up the phone, Mom. hang up! I can't believe someone would be so cruel as to pull a prank like this. This is the worst thing I've ever heard of in my life!"

"What did you say?" Colleen said to the coroner. She could hardly hear his response.

"Mom, listen to me!" Carly yelled. "There's no way that isn't Laura. Her family and her boyfriend have been right at her side for five weeks. Five weeks! Don't you think they would have noticed if it weren't Laura? A lot of my friends have seen her. Kelly was there! Mom, don't you think my own roommate would have noticed something as obvious as this!? Whitney doesn't look like Laura. Why would someone do this?" She began crying. "Mom, hang up the phone. Hang up, HANG UP!"

Finally Colleen asked the coroner, "May I call you back? I really need some time to think."

The coroner seemed taken aback by her question. "Mrs. Cerak, this is a very serious matter. We need you to bring your daughter's dental records to the hospital in Grand Rapids as quickly as possible so that we can make a positive identification."

"I understand that. What's your number there?"

"Mrs. Cerak!"

"May I please have your number?" Colleen's mind could not process what he was telling her; she was in shock. Maybe Carly is right. Maybe this is nothing but a cruel, cruel hoax. Once Colleen had the phone number, she hung up the phone and sank into her chair. Carly sat across from her on the sofa, fuming.

"Who could be so cruel?" Carly asked. Colleen didn't respond. She checked the phone number and discovered that the call had, in fact, come from Marion General Hospital in Indiana, the hospital to which Whitney's body had been taken on the night she died.

"That doesn't mean the call was real," Carly protested. She looked over at her mother. "Mom, you don't actually believe this garbage, do you?" She threw up her hands in frustration. In her mind, Carly believed she had to be the voice of reason in the family. Her father, a youth pastor, was in New York with a group of high school seniors for their annual graduation trip. With him gone, she kicked into full big-sister mode. "Mom, believe me. I know that the girl in the hospital is Laura, not Whitney. I know what I'm talking about. Who are you going to believe, your own daughter or some stranger making prank calls in the middle of the night!?"

Colleen didn't know what to do next. She hesitated to call and awaken her husband, Newell, when she didn't yet have any firm information. Going on this trip had been a hard enough decision for him. It was his first step toward something approaching normalcy in his job since they'd lost Whitney five weeks earlier. If this was in fact a hoax, Colleen saw no reason to make him suffer through it as well. Unsure of where else to turn, she called Newell's best friend and coworker, Pastor Jim Mathis, who had walked with the family through the tragedy of Whitney's death. "Jim, we have a situation here," she said, "and I don't know where else to turn. We just received a phone call..."

"A fake phone call!" Carly shouted in the background.

"We just received a phone call from someone claiming to be the Grant County coroner. He said..." -- Colleen could hardly believe the words were coming out of her mouth -- "he said that Whitney may be alive."

"What?" Jim said. "How?"

"I don't know. I don't even know if the call was real. Would you check it out for me? I don't think I can."

"Sure. What's the number?"

Five minutes later he called back and said, "It looks like we need to go on another road trip."

As soon as she hung up the phone, Colleen called the family dentist for Whitney's dental records, which he said he would bring over right away. Only then did she call her husband. The moment Colleen said his name, Newell knew something was wrong. "Not Carly," he said. "Please tell me that it's not Carly." With Whitney gone, he couldn't bear the thought of something happening to their only surviving daughter.

"No, no, no. Carly's fine. It's uh...it's about Whitney."

"What?"

"I just got a call from the Grant County coroner's office, and they think...they think Whitney may be alive."

"That's impossible," he said. "We buried her. She can't be alive."

"Let me talk to him," Carly yelled in the background and then grabbed the phone out of her mother's hand. "Don't believe any of this, Dad. The phone call said they think Laura is Whitney, but she can't be. My friends saw her. They know Whitney. Believe me, Dad, this is impossible!"

"I know, Carly. I know" was all he could say in response.

Colleen got back on the line. "Jim is going to drive us down to Grand Rapids so we can hand over Whitney's dental records to the hospital. I'm sure it's nothing but a wild-goose chase, but we have to go."

"Be sure to call me as soon as you get there," Newell said. Then he hung up the phone and tried to sleep, to no avail. His mind spun out of control as he lay in the dark. He replayed all that had happened since Colleen had first called him on April 26, 2006, and told him that Whitney had been in an accident. He had been away on a ministry-related trip that night as well. Since then he'd carried a hole in his soul that could not be filled. Yet it wasn't a grief without hope. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Whitney was in the very presence of God in heaven. Yet now the family was told she was not in heaven, but alive in a hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "Unbelievable," he repeated over and over.

As he tossed and turned in his bed, one thought raced through his mind: How can this even be possible? If a mistake had been made, someone would have noticed in the first couple of days. But five weeks? Five weeks?! Impossible. How could the Van Ryns not have realized this girl wasn't their daughter? She must be horribly disfigured, since it wasn't just the immediate family who would have to be mistaken. Her boyfriend and all of Laura's closest friends had also visited her in the hospital, and not one of them had alerted authorities that there might be a mistake. How could no one have noticed they had misidentified the person in that bed?

Neither he nor Colleen had seen Whitney's body after the accident. It had made sense at the time, but now a wave of self-doubt washed over him. We didn't want the image of Whit lying in a casket burned in our minds, he reminded himself. Colleen and I agreed that we didn't want that to be the first thing we thought of when we thought about her. Not once had they questioned their decision. Now, for the first time, Newell wondered how the authorities had identified the bodies at the scene of the accident. That opened the door for the biggest question of all: Could Whitney really be alive?

While Newell tossed and turned in bed at a campground in New Jersey, the rest of the family got ready for what Carly later called "the worst car trip of my life." Colleen told her, "You should pack some clothes to take with us. If this really is Whitney, we'll probably stay down there for a while."

Carly shot her mother a look. "Would you be realistic, Mother? I told you. My friends have been down there. They've seen her. They all know it's Laura. If it were Whitney, don't you think Laura's best friends would have noticed?"

"Carly, please, we just have to make su...

Customer Reviews

A Story of Hope and Faith Amidst Tragedy
This is a touching book about two families caught up in a tragedy that no one should ever have to live through. It is not about the gory details so much as it is about how their Christian faith got them through. Due to all the religious references throughout, those who do not share their intense Christian faith might be disappointed by this book. It doesn't really dwell on the complex feelings that surround the death of a loved one. Their faith is so strong that they don't have time to dwell on much else. And I realize that everyone reacts to death in a different way. Right up front, you need to know that this is only the Van Ryns' and the Ceraks' experience.

There are some technical writing/grammar issues here and there and yet I found the story so amazingly powerful that I was able to ignore that. The way the book was set up was near-perfect. I've read books like this before that sort of wander all over the place but this was very straight-forward and to the point. It begins with the phone call where the Ceraks learn that Whitney is still alive and then it goes back in time to the night of the accident. From there on out, it switches back and forth between the two families as they explain what life was like for them after April 26, 2006 (the day of the accident). The alternating family viewpoints don't always match-up time-wise, but I found the book to be fairly easy to follow. I found the final page of the final chapter to be a moving end to a well-told story of faith and hope amidst unimaginable heartbreak. The final chapter was followed by an epilogue, written by Whitney.

Yes, there were times when I wondered if the family members were relating back to the reader what they were feeling exactly at each moment in time. I kind of wondered if some of what they claimed to be feeling at the time was really what they were feeling as they wrote the book, a year or so after the fact. I can't even begin to imagine what an experience like that must have been like, so I don't want to pretend like I do. All I know is that there were times when I wondered, "Is that really how it happened or is that only how she remembers it now that she's had time to think it over?" I'm not saying this to criticize them. I'm sure they did the best they could to describe what it was like. It couldn't have been easy. Far from it. I just say that because I want to warn people that it might seem unbelievable at times. And it is a story that is unbelievable anyway, though we know these events are what happened. For the most part, I thought they did a very good job describing what it was like to go through the things they went through. But like I said before, it must be hard to describe exactly how it felt and everyone deals with tragedy differently anyway. I think the emotional heart of the story remains intact, even though the book seems to gloss over the complexities of the grieving process. I think it's possible they didn't want to get into the nitty-gritty of everything they were thinking, and you know, if that's the case, that's fine. I respect that. The important thing is that they are trying to make the best of a horrible situation. For that alone, I admire them. I think if you're looking for an honest look at the grieving process, you might question this book. I think what you have to do is take this not as a blueprint to follow precisely so much as an offering of hope and a challenge to reach out to others even when its hard. As Christians do believe, no one is perfect and all anyone can do is try their best.

I don't agree with those who complain about all the religious references. I understand where people are coming from. But remember, this is the Van Ryns' and the Ceraks' story, as they lived it. Not as the reader wishes it to be told. In a day and age when the gut reaction is to sue the pants off anyone and everyone, it is refreshing to read a book like this where the two families had every reason in the world to feel bitterness and anger and yet chose hope over blame. That is really what makes this book the powerful story that it is. It was faith that allowed them to do that. Yeah, you could argue that non-Christians are capable of that too, but they're not writing about a non-Christian's experience. They're writing about their own. Better to write fully about their own than to spread themselves thin and try to write about everyone's. And there's no reason to indulge in all the little sensationalistic details for the sake of satisfying the public's curiosity. And if they'd toned down the faith angle so as to appeal to a larger audience, that would have been dishonest. It's faith that got them through this so why should they pretend otherwise? It's easy enough to keep your interviews neutral when you only have to give a basic summary of what happened. But when writing an entire book, it's a little harder to do that. To be honest, I don't think they could have even really explained how the mix-up happened, beyond giving us the answers that everyone already knew. I think it's one of those things that you just live through and you'll never fully understand how or why it happened. So all we can really say is that it's something that can and should be avoided in the future. And it was very touching to see how these two families saw it as an opportunity to grow in their faith and bond with someone they might not have otherwise. And they used this as an opportunity to reach out to others. They didn't have to. Nobody forced them to write this book. They chose to. They weren't obligated to write it in any way but the way they did. They only had a responsibility to be as truthful about their own experience as they could be. They included everything they could reasonably be expected to include. It's just that you can't please everyone, nor should you try to.


I gave it a four but it's more of a 3 1/2. I would recommend it, but I realize there are probably lots of people who wouldn't really appreciate it. I can't claim it will be liked by everyone.

Four and a half stars -- not great literature, but an amazing compelling story
Believe it or not, I came to this book through a TV show. What's really ironic about that is I don't even have TV. My boyfriend and I run a bookstore, and most of our time, energy, and focus is caught up with books and the day-to-day needs of our business. Why bother paying for TV when most of it is junk, and we don't have time anyway? We do, however, like "House", and so we rent the DVDs. I saw an episode from Season 4 -- I believe it was the opening episode -- about two young women who worked in an office building that collapsed. I won't give everything away, but suffice it to say, their identities were mixed up. I talked to a friend about how much that episode touched me, stayed with me, had me reflecting on it for days. She suggested this book.

The story seems unbelieveable, as many people have said -- more like a storyline for a TV show or a movie than something that could really happen in real life.

I hate to join in the "circus-for-free" syndrome that we seem to have, almost helpless to turn our eyes away from the accident scene, the smoke pouring out the windows of the burning building, the crumbled buildings and bodies left in the wake of the latest disaster shown on the news. Nevertheless, this story was so compelling. I had to known more about what transpired, what the families went through, how the mix-up happened. I believe and respect that the only reason these families agreed to write their blog, do some media interviews, and eventually do this book was the opportunity to share their faith.

I grew up in the church, but I have often stayed on the perimeter, uncomfortable with so many things done and said in the name of Christianity. I am often uncomfortable with stories as heavily evangelical as this. In this case, I was so proud of the Van Ryns and the Ceraks. They are living their faith, and sharing it beyond "the shadow of the valley of Death", being content in all things because of the One who strengthens them, tested like Job. I was not "turned off" this story by how much they told it by faith. I was deeply touched.

it's not as good as i thought
i got this book to learn more about this tragic accident and how whitney is dong not but it didn't fufil my expections it was reallg good adn really detaild but almost too much in some areas this book is defintley for evangelicle christans because their is a lot of prayers adn refernces to the bible so be prepared for that. i have osay that i am not one to read books fast and a person that can't put a book down and this is one of the few i couldn't put dowm i read it in 2.5 days