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Colonial Memorial Park in Hamilton, the cemetery where a woman believed to be Sharolyn Jackson was buried Aug. 3.

(Tim Lukowicz/For the Times)

TRENTON — Sharolyn Jackson's family thought she looked a little different at her Aug. 3 funeral, but the 50-year-old Philadelphia woman had been dead for a couple of weeks at that point, so they thought nothing of it.

“When everything was over with, everyone was saying she didn’t look like herself, but it looked enough like her to be her,” Jackson’s mother Carrie Minney said today. “The nose was different but I figured they must have had to work at the nose or something.”

It turned out everybody’s instincts had been correct. The woman in the coffin was not Jackson, and it wasn’t until after the burial that the family found out that Jackson was, in fact, alive and well.

It all started when Minney received a phone call from a Philadelphia hospital about a woman who died there on July 20. Jackson had been reported missing, and the hospital thought maybe they had her body.

“Well, we were told that she was dead so my grandson went to Philadelphia to identify the body, and he had to identify her from a picture, from a black and white picture,” Minney said.

Jackson’s 30-year-old son wasn’t able to view the body in the morgue, Minney said.

“He said the picture ... looked like his mother. We brought her back to Trenton and did the funeral,” she said.

But on Aug. 16 a woman actually identified as Sharolyn Jackson turned up at another Philadelphia hospital, and Minney received a call from Horizon House in Philadelphia, where Jackson had been receiving treatment for drug and mental health problems.

“Someone called my grandson from Horizon House. They called him and told him they think Sharolyn is alive,” Minney said. “It can’t be true because we buried her,” she recalled thinking.

This time, hospital officials used fingerprinting to correctly identify Jackson.



Minney said she hadn't spoken to her daughter since July 1, when Jackson said she was going to enter the Horizon House program. She said her family had not put out the missing person report, and had assumed everything was all right.

“She told me her phone was going to get shut off because she had a big bill,” Minney said. “I kept calling her. I just assumed her phone was still off.”

A representative from Horizon House had viewed the photos of the dead woman and confirmed her as Jackson, along with Jackson’s son.

The medical examiner determined the woman died of heat stroke, signed a death certificate and released the body to the family, Philadelphia Department of Health spokesman James Garrow said.

“If someone comes in and they’re a family member and say, ‘That’s my mom,’ that’s generally good enough,” Garrow said.

Minney held the funeral for the dead woman at Campbell Funeral Chapel on Calhoun Street on Aug. 3.

Owner John Campbell said today nothing like that had happened to his business before.

Minney said she has since visited her daughter, who wouldn’t say much about where she has been lately.

“She wasn’t in such a good state, she doesn’t want to talk. She wants to sleep,” Minney said.

Jackson has an apartment in Philadelphia and told her mother that a man ransacked it. Minney has not seen the apartment.

“She said she was drugged, we don’t know that to be true or what,” Minney said.

The now unidentified woman who was buried by Jackson's family at Colonial Memorial Park in Hamilton will be exhumed and identified.



The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Contact Alyssa Mease at amease@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5673.

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