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On April 30, 2006, Colleen Cerak woke up crying. Her husband, Newell, held her for a few moments. "I never knew I could hurt this bad," he said. It was their daughter Whitney's 19th birthday. It was also the day of her visitation.
Just four days earlier, Whitney, along with five other college students and four employees from Taylor University, had been in an automobile accident. They'd been returning to the Upland, Indiana, campus following a banquet when a semi-tractor truck had struck their van, killing four students and one worker.
The coroner had called Colleen the day of the crash to tell her Whitney had been pronounced dead at the accident scene. Colleen and Newell had agreed not to identify the body themselves, haunted by the words of a friend who'd recently lost her daughter: "I can't shake the image of her lying in a casket." The Ceraks preferred to remember their vibrant daughter active and laughing.
The day after the visitation, they held the funeral, celebrating Whitney's life with her favorite worship songs. Hours later, family members buried the casket in a patch of Michigan earth near the soccer fields where Whitney played growing up.
As Colleen, Newell, and Whitney's two sisters tried to adjust to the gaping hole in their family, they occasionally received updates on the one surviving student, Laura Van Ryn, who was making a slow, steady recovery at a hospital across the state.
A month later, on May 31, Colleen woke at 2 a.m. to a ringing phone. It was the coroner again. When he said, "We believe your daughter may be alive," Colleen was stunned—and skeptical. Doctors now thought the surviving student they'd believed to be Laura Van Ryn was actually Whitney. But how could the Van Ryns, who'd nursed the girl for nearly five weeks, not have realized she wasn't their daughter?
Soon, Colleen was on her way to the hospital. There, officials explained that questions about the patient's identity had arisen as she'd healed from facial injuries and regained speech and dexterity. When asked to write her name, she'd scrawled, "W-H-I-T-N-E-Y." When asked her parents' names, she'd replied, "Newell and Colleen." Growing suspicious, doctors had checked Laura's dental records. To everyone's shock, the records had confirmed the person in the bed wasn't Laura. Soon after, the coroner had called the Ceraks.
When Colleen finally entered the room labeled "Laura Van Ryn," she took one look at the girl in the bed, and whispered, "It's Whitney." Dental records soon confirmed Colleen's words.
This past March, the Ceraks and Van Ryns released Mistaken Identity (Howard), a book about the incident that changed their lives and stunned the nation. Shortly after the book's release, both families appeared on Oprah, Dateline NBC, and the Today show.
TCW recently talked with Colleen to discover how she felt getting her daughter back from the dead, how Whitney's doing now, and how this whole ordeal has affected their faith.
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