Mary Jane Mendoza, 20, was watching her daughter this Thursday in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí when she noticed that her 3-year-old daughter was still breathing despite having been declared dead.
Camila Roxana Martínez Mendoza had fallen ill a few days earlier with vomiting, fever, and diarrhea.
She had just turned 3 years old and she was a week away from attending kindergarten for the first time, something that had her very excited, her mother told the Mexican newspaper Reforma.
"She told me: 'Mommy, when I go to kindergarten you buy me my lunch box and you're going to tell me: get up, melolenga, get up!'" she recounted.
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Concerned about her illness, Mendoza took the girl to the Salinas Municipal Community Hospital, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from her town of La Herradura.
"They gave her 30 drops of paracetamol and told me that my daughter was fine, that I could take her home," the woman said.
Camila Roxana Martínez Mendoza, 3 years old.Millennium
But the girl did not improve and in less than 12 hours she had to return to the hospital.
She was transferred to the emergency room and two hours later a doctor notified her that her daughter had died, the newspaper Milenio reported.
"When I grabbed her body, the girl hugged me and I told the doctor that she was still alive, but he told me to release her and took me out to wait for the certificate," Mendoza said. The cause of her death was recorded as "severe dehydration, acute diarrhea and hypovolemic shock.
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Heartbroken, the mother carried her daughter's body back to La Herradura.
The family hastily arranged a wake and even rented a Mini Mouse jumpsuit, the girl's favorite cartoon character.
They also notified the girl's father, who had immigrated to the United States last year so he could "send her anything she wants," including the lunch box and backpack she would need at school.
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Some relatives had noticed that the girl's skin tone did not pale, as happens to corpses.
But it was her mother who discovered, according to what she said, that her daughter still moved her eyes.
"You're going through a trauma, it's normal," she remembers being told so she wouldn't cling to the hope that the girl was still alive.
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Felicitas Martínez, the girl's grandmother, found that the glass of the coffin had fogged up, as if someone were indeed breathing inside.
Then they called the village nurse and after measuring her vital signs they found that she had not died.
They called an ambulance and took her back to the community hospital, from where she was sent to the Central Hospital of San Luis Potosí.
But doctors declared her dead on the way.
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Martínez's second death certificate indicates "that she died of brain death," said her mother. "She lasted several hours there in the box, but there I feel that it is the fault of the doctor who gave her to me presumed dead," he denounced.
The State Prosecutor's Office has announced an investigation for alleged medical negligence: "We are defining several lines of investigation, also in relation to the actions of the doctors, the funeral services, the municipalities of both Villa de Ramos and Salinas," said the prosecutor. General, Jose Luis Ruiz Contreras.