Tyler John Chase was declared dead at age 23 from an overdose, his body found alone on the street, the medical examiner told his stunned family. Months later, the medical examiner called back. A horrible mistake had been made.
Latasha Rosales thought the person on the other end of the phone was playing an unbelievably cruel joke.
At first she was confused. Then she was very angry.
The caller said she was the medical examiner for Oregon's Multnomah County. There had been a mistake, she told Rosales, about her cousin.
Tyler John Chase, who had been declared dead three months ago by her office, was not dead. He had not died from an overdose. His body had not been found alone on a Portland street. The 23-year-old was very much alive and living in a drug rehabilitation center.
Rosales has been Tyler's closest relative since his mother died more than three years ago.
"I can't even put into words how I felt when I got that call," Rosales tells Inside Edition Digital. "At first I thought I was being pranked." And her confusion evolved into something stronger.
"I was pretty pissed off. I was upset. I said 'Whose fault is this? Who did this?'"
The fault occurred when investigators discovered Chase's wallet on the body found in September. Inside was a temporary paper driver's license in Chase's name, with a smudged photograph, his cousin says.
The medical examiner's office has publicly admitted its mistake and has said it is implementing policy changes to ensure a similar error doesn't happen again.
"We deeply regret that the misidentification happened. The misidentification occurred because the deceased person was carrying Mr. Tyler Chase’s wallet and his official temporary Oregon driver’s license," the office said in a statement to Inside Edition Digital.
"The Medical Examiner’s Office also launched a comprehensive review to identify any gaps in current practices and is working to implement an institutional change. Going forward, all individuals who are found with a temporary state-issued identification must also have fingerprints submitted for positive identification, to ensure that this will never happen again," the statement added.
The identify of young man whose body was discovered on a Portland street has not been released. His ashes, held in an urn, had been sitting in Rosales' home for three months. All that time, she thought they belonged to Travis.
The man had stolen Travis' wallet from the rehabilitation facility where they both had been in treatment, and was carrying it when he died, she said.
Rosales says she is, of course, overjoyed that her young cousin is alive, healthy, clean and sober. It is extraordinarily good news. Yet she struggles to process how a bureaucratic snafu completely upended her life. Not once, but twice, in the space of three months.
"This isn't just minor," Rosales says. "This affected my mental health tremendously. I was devastated," to learn Travis was dead, she says. Then, a week before Christmas, she learned he was alive. "I was just like ..." She struggles for adequate words. "I felt like I had an out of- body- experience. This is the kind of stuff you see on TV. This doesn't happen in real life."
But it did.
Rosales says the medical examiner offered to do a video call with Tyler, to prove he was very much alive. "Yes, let's do a Facetime," Rosales replied.
The woman called back. And there was Tyler, standing like Lazarus raised from the dead, smiling and saying, "Hi! I love you!"
"You're alive," his cousin stammered. "Then I just burst into tears," she tells Inside Edition Digital.
Rosales had not seen Travis since his mother died in 2020. The mother and son both battled addiction to meth, she said, and both had ended up on the streets.
Travis was at his mother's viewing, after she was found dead at a Portland encampment. The mother had died from health complications, Rosales says.
Her son was not coping well. "After his mom died, he just lost it," Rosales says. The cousins stayed in touch via social media, then Travis went silent.
Their family, Rosales says, has been "very poor." The stranglehold of addiction sucked the life out of many she loved.
"My family, the majority of them have been addicts," she says. "I grew up with that. I didn't want that for myself. I didn't want to get sucked up into that."
When Travis vanished from social media, Rosales says she reached out to those who knew him, but was ghosted.
"He was a transient, and I'm a mother," she says. "I didn't physically go look for him because I didn't know where to look," and the places he might be, would most likely be unwelcoming for a woman alone, she feared.
She feels guilt over that, she says. Sometimes, "I think I should have done more to help my cousin. But I couldn't."
Travis said he, too, had looked for her and other relatives, but several had moved, and another had died, Rosales says.
None of that means a lot now. Travis has been found. And family is family.
Travis spent Christmas with his 35-year-old cousin and her three children, ages 11, 8, and 23 months. He is still living at the rehab center, where he is working on completing a drug court treatment plan.
He graduates on Jan. 20. He has been clean and sober for 10 months, his cousin says.
"We're talking about letting him live with me," she says. "He's gained some weight. He looks really good. He is so happy to be reconnected with family."
She wants her cousin to experience living in a stable home, where there are no drug demons and no fear of losing the roof over his head. She wants to show him what love and a sense of belonging can feel like.
She wants him to know the comfort of family.
"I'm just a really hopeful person," she says. "I hope if he sees it's possible to live a normal life, that he can, too. I want him to see that I have my children that I'm raising, and it's possible to live a healthy life."
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