Brazilian man shocks mourners by attending own funeral

A Brazilian car washer shocked mourners when he turned up for his own funeral in Sao Paulo.

Forty-one-year-old Gilberto Araujo had been proclaimed dead following an identification carried out by his brother, Jose Marcos, who had been asked to identify the body of a deceased car washer.

Jose identified the body of a “similar looking” man and took him to his mother’s house for the wake.

“The two men closely resembled each other and both worked as car washers,” said police inspector Roberto Lima, adding that the man whose body was in the morgue was named Genivaldo Santos Gama.

Hours prior to the funeral “a friend of Gilberto’s saw him walking down the street and told him that his family was mourning him,” he continued. “So he went to his mother’s home to let everyone know he was very much alive.”

When Araujo showed up at his wake, “some people fainted and others were so scared they ran away. It was a big shock,” family friend Maria Menezes told the G1 online news site.