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Background: News footage of the urn that was supposed to contain the cremated remains of Shanice Crews (WROC). Inset: Shanice Crews (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System).
A New York woman who went missing and was purportedly found dead turned up alive — in another state.
According to WROC, a CBS affiliate in Rochester, the family of 31-year-old Shanice Crews was told that their loved one was found dead in the spring of 2024. The cause, according to the Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office, was a cocaine overdose. Authorities told Crews’ family that they believe she had died that February. Her remains were cremated and mixed with the remains of the family matriarch, distributed among the family in jewelry that let them carry the ashes of their departed relatives with them.
But Shanice Crews was actually alive, and residing in Michigan.
Crews’ sister Shanita Hopkins, whose age was not provided, spoke to WROC about the strange story and invited the outlet into her home, where she kept an urn that she had believed held the ashes of her late sister.
Hopkins told the station that months after her family held a memorial service for Crews, she received a text message out of the blue from a woman she didn’t know. It included a picture of a very familiar woman and read, “Ma’am I’m concerned your sister is not dead. She just volunteered at my event today.”
Hopkins identified the woman as Shanice Crews. She told WROC that she immediately called the police, who referred her to the medical examiner’s office. Authorities attempted to reassure Hopkins that the dental records from the body they had identified as Crews were a match — but Hopkins was not convinced. The next step was matching DNA.
“They wanted my youngest sister, because her and Shanice has the same mom and dad, and then they wanted her son,” Hopkins explained. “So, both of them went and they did a DNA test, and when the results came back, they said it wasn’t a match [for the remains].”
Even more questions followed. Hopkins told WROC, “We dealt with the ashes and stuff. We put them in necklaces and we mixed my mom with this stranger.”
The Monroe County Medical Examiner told WROC in a statement that they were “unable to comment on specific cases.” Hopkins said that the office has since reclaimed the ashes that were once believed to belong to Crews.
WROC reported that neither the outlet nor Crews’ family have been able to get in touch with their loved one, whom they haven’t seen since they reported her missing in July 2021. Hopkins told WROC, that if she could talk to her sister, she would tell her, “I love her.”
She continued, “I’ve been angry for … I’m still angry. I don’t think I’m ever gonna get over the anger, but I know how it feels … I know how it feels to think that she was dead, and that, I just want her to know that. I just want her to know that whatever we had going on, it doesn’t even matter. Like, I love her, that’s it. That’s all I would want her to know.”
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