Man Comes Back on Day of His Funeral

It was shocking enough when a Los Angeles County coroner’s official showed up at Ronnie Blakeney’s door in November to break the news that her estranged husband was dead.

But it seemed downright preposterous when he told her how Charles David Blakeney Jr., a Harvard-educated psychologist and former White House advisor, had died--while in police custody and from an abscess caused by using dirty needles to inject drugs.

Ronnie Blakeney asked to see the body. The coroner’s messenger refused. The body, he said, was being autopsied. When she voiced skepticism, she was told that fingerprints checked by police confirmed that the dead man was the 51-year-old husband she hadn’t seen for weeks. “It was my worst nightmare,” she said.

Not quite. Just hours before the funeral, Ronnie finally had a chance to view the body. She screamed. It wasn’t Charles.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office had mistakenly identified the body as that of her estranged husband, who shocked everyone by showing up the day he was to have been buried, unaware of his supposed demise.

As Ronnie Blakeney eventually learned, the dead man was Donald Bruce Crisp, a transient and chronic drug addict who had been arrested for drug possession.

He died Nov. 5, two days after his arrest. Crisp was carrying Blakeney’s driver’s license, which had been lost months before. And both men were African American.

But as Ronnie Blakeney discovered when she looked at the body before it was placed in the coffin, the two men did not look at all alike.

The case of mistaken identity has devastated Ronnie Blakeney and her family, they say.

“He might have died and now he’s alive again, but somewhere in between we suffered and lived this man’s death,” said Jan Frankel Schau, Ronnie Blakeney’s sister and her lawyer.

The family has one claim for damages pending against police; four against Los Angeles County have been denied. Schau said the family is planning to sue.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office blames the Los Angeles Police Department for mistakenly identifying the dead drug addict as Charles Blakeney. Sandra Dyson, acting commander of the LAPD’s identification section, declined to comment on the case last week except to say it’s under investigation as a personnel matter.

The coroner’s chief investigator, Craig Harvey, said “you have a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach and you feel very bad and you want to assure the family that we’re sorry. But the damage is done.”

A Difficult Time

The tangled story began when Charles Blakeney, a former advisor to the White House Office of Domestic Policy and the California Department of Social Services, lost his wallet.

The loss came at a difficult time. He and his wife, who also has a Harvard doctorate in psychology, had closed a Berkeley treatment center for abused girls that they had run for 18 years. The closing had plunged Charles Blakeney into depression.

In October the couple, who had moved to Los Angeles, separated. At one point, Blakeney had dropped from sight after leaving in tears from a relative’s house where he had been staying.

About the time Blakeney disappeared, police arrested Crisp in South-Central Los Angeles for drug possession.

Officers found Blakeney’s identification in his possession. They fingerprinted Crisp. Then they ran his fingerprints--with Blakeney’s name--through the computer to see if the arrested man had a criminal record.

Crisp had had two felony drug convictions, records show. But the computer couldn’t find his prints. The reason: Although they were in the LAPD’s paper archives, someone apparently had neglected to enter them into the computer system.

Thus when Crisp died, he was, to the LAPD at least, a man named Charles Blakeney.

Beginning its own identification procedure, the coroner’s office faxed the dead man’s fingerprints to the Police Department. The Police Department replied that the man’s name was Charles David Blakeney.

“We had no reason to doubt what we were given,” said coroner’s investigator Harvey. “It’s like the hospital hands you your baby and says: ‘This is your baby.’ How do you doubt that? Yet we all know that . . . hospitals mix babies up.”

Disbelieving Wife

Thinking they knew the name of the dead man, coroner’s officials searched for his survivors. They found Ronnie Blakeney, whom they assumed was the widow.

She refused to believe the news.

“I said, ‘My husband wasn’t an [intravenous] drug user. He wasn’t shooting heroin,’ ” she said. “I would know if he was shooting heroin.”

Ronnie Blakeney said she couldn’t reconcile the police version of her husband’s death as a drug addict with his life. Yet she also knew her husband was depressed, and missing from his relative’s home.

Then there was the confident air of the investigator, an authority figure complete with a badge, uniform and his gentle sympathy, she said.

She said the investigator seemed to shrug off her questions. She wanted to know, for example, why the dead man gave no address when he was arrested. Or why he was carrying a driver’s license that was reported lost.

As if to underscore the finality of it all, she said, he “slid a packet of papers to me that had everything about our lives on it.” It contained a list of cars registered to Charles and Ronnie Blakeney, including one with a distinctive personalized license plate.

The investigator also suggested that the anger and denial Ronnie was feeling were normal, confiding that he “lived in denial for a long time” after his wife’s suicide 10 years ago.

“There was no convincing him it was his mistake,” she added. “He didn’t even waffle.”

Finally, Ronnie said she suspended disbelief and accepted the news. She plunged into planning her husband’s funeral, which, according to Jewish tradition, had to be performed as close as possible within 24 hours.

She pulled two children out of school and called the eldest in Paris. She placed an obituary in a San Francisco paper and got the word out to friends and relatives, who flocked to town from throughout California, Seattle, Kansas City, Las Vegas and New York.

She draped the mirrors and television in mourning, laid out burial clothes, composed a memorial booklet, helped write a eulogy and went to Hillside Memorial Cemetery on the Westside to purchase mausoleum vaults and a casket.

“I walked in there with all the caskets and I thought . . . that he would be forever in that box. . . . My God, that was much harder than I thought it was going to be.”

But nothing could prepare her for what happened just hours before the funeral, Nov. 9, a Sunday. At the cemetery’s request, and to fulfill a desire for “one last touch,” Ronnie went to Hillside to view the body before it was put in the coffin.

As two rabbis stood nearby to perform the ritual cleansing, Ronnie’s brother-in-law went into the cemetery’s morgue. He came out, ashen-faced.

“He said, ‘Ron, hold on. I don’t think it’s him,’ ” she said. “And he takes my hand. I start shaking and crying. I’m freaking.”

Ronnie said she rushed in and saw that the dead man was a stranger. Blakeney has gray, wavy hair; the dead man’s was black and tightly curled. Blakeney’s skin is smooth and light; he has a slight frame. The dead man was dark and big, and his body was hairy.

She lifted the sheet to check his feet. It was the wrong body.

“In my experience, this definitely has not happened before,” said Mark A. Friedman, Hillside’s chief executive officer for five years. “Folks that I work with who have been here longer don’t remember it happening, either.”

Funeral Is Called Off

Grief turned to joy, mourning to celebration, said Ronnie and her sister. Unable to reach dozens of guests coming straight from the airport, they put up a sign at the cemetery: “Charles Blakeney is not deceased.”

They left a similar message on the answering machine at Ronnie’s home.

Lorrie and Mark Lee got the word at Los Angeles International Airport after their arrival from Seattle. Lorrie said Mark, a former pro football player and Blakeney’s youngest brother, was devastated by the news of the death.

But when they arrived at the airport, a relative greeted them at the gate and told them Charles was alive.

“At first, we looked at him and thought, ‘That was a sick sense of humor,’ ” she said. “Then, my husband and I grabbed each other and hugged each other, we were so happy.

“It was like a whirlwind. We had gone through the mourning process, and then confusion and then just joy, the whole realm of emotions that you go through.”

Amid all the drama, Charles Blakeney had no idea what was happening.

After disappearing from his relative’s house, he spent a few days with friends trying to recover from his depression.

Blakeney heard about his reported death on the morning of his purported funeral while walking to his sister’s house in Compton. She happened to drive by. When she saw him, she veered to the curb and shrieked.

“She was crying and said, ‘You’re supposed to be dead! You’re supposed to be dead!’ ” Blakeney said.

He said he got into the car and tried to calm her. “I said, ‘What do you mean, I’m supposed to be dead? You see me, don’t you?’ It took me a while to convince her that I was actually in the car with her.”

Even now, friends and relatives are bewildered when they see him.

“I have to explain to people why I’m not dead,” said the psychologist. “It’s almost like I’m sort of a freak.”