Family Goes From Grieving to Grateful

Herlinda Estrada signed her husband’s death certificate and joined other grieving family members in a hospital waiting room. Then her husband walked in.

Jose Estrada didn’t exactly wake from the dead, but his return seemed just as miraculous after a series of coincidences led Herlinda Estrada to mistakenly believe that her husband had died of a heart attack along a jogging trail.

Since he turned up safe and sound, the couple’s 29-year marriage has never seemed sweeter.

“You begin to understand just how important the people in your life really are and how much you would miss them if they were gone,” Jose Estrada said.

“I kept thinking about the Jimmy Stewart movie, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ I kept thinking, it really is a wonderful life.”

The mix-up began on Feb. 11 when Estrada, 48, decided to go for a run on a jogging trail near his home. He was recently diagnosed as diabetic and was following doctors’ orders to lose a few pounds.

Estrada parked his pickup in a lot near the trail and started on his run.

What he didn’t know was that paramedics had just left the area with a heart-attack victim about his age who had collapsed and died along the same trail. The dead man carried no identification, leaving only a set of General Motors keys as a clue to his identity.

A sheriff’s deputy called to the scene decided to see if the man’s keys fit any of the GM vehicles in the parking lot. Against all odds, they fit Estrada’s truck.

The deputy contacted Herlinda Estrada and broke the news, asking her to identify the body at a hospital in Houston.

“They took me into the room to identify Jose, and all I could see was this swollen, pale body under a sheet on the bed,” she said. “There was a tube in the man’s mouth, and tape over his mouth and eyes, so I couldn’t really see his face.”

She held the dead man’s hand and it felt like Estrada’s. Then she saw that the clothes the man was wearing looked like her husband’s.

“I thought, ‘This must be Jose,’ ” she said. “You’re in such a state of shock, anyway, you’re not thinking straight.”

She signed the death certificate and joined other grieving members of her family in a hospital waiting room.

Jose Estrada, meanwhile, finished his jog and picked up some groceries on the way home. While putting away the groceries, his wife’s boss called.

“She said, ‘Jose! You’re not dead! Someone called and said you’d had a heart attack and died! But you’re not dead!’ ” Estrada recalled.

He raced to the hospital for a happy reunion with about 15 family members, friends and neighbors.

Relatives said the scare gave them a new appreciation for one another.

“After I stopped hugging him and laughing, I started crying,” Herlinda Estrada said. “And I told him, ‘If you ever die on me again, I’ll kill you myself.’ ”