Back from the dead? Florida man mistaken as dead in fender bender is very much alive

A Florida man has come back from the dead, quite literally.

His daughters teased him recently, saying that he will be the star of Halloween this year.

"You can be the walking dead," they told him.

It isn't because of his killer zombie impression, but rather he (legally) just came back from the dead after police accidentally marked a fender bender as fatal.

Moises Ramos, a 51-year-old real estate broker from Miami, got in a minor car accident as he was pulling out of his driveway in 2019.

"I guess we were both at the wrong place at the wrong time," Ramos said to USA TODAY in an interview Friday. "She hit me in the rear, spun my car around. And we had to call it in for insurance purposes."

He filed an insurance claim and went about his life, not thinking anything further came from the crash until he applied to become an Uber driver in 2022.

His application was denied due to a fatal car crash in 2019.

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Police tell Ramos: 'You're the fatality'

Ramos knew that there had to have been a mistake, but originally he thought that police had declared the other person involved in the accident dead. But when Ramos went to the Cutler Bay Police Department to look into the matter, he realized what had happened.

"The lady that was behind the desk there, she seemed a little bit odd, like looking at me a little weird," Ramos remembered before she went to get the report.

She said his incident report was coming up as a fatality and was due to officers accidentally marking his injuries as fatal in the report. "You're the fatality," she told him.

"Oh my goodness gracious," he responded as they laughed about it.

Ramos 'fighting to come back to life' on paper

Getting his record changed back at the state level was not so much a laughing matter, however. Ramos said he called several times over the course of the months that followed. He didn't have much luck until a legal segment called "Help Me Howard" at 7 News Miami stepped in to pressure the department.

A spokesperson at the Miami-Dade Police Department confirmed the account of the mistaken fatality, and said it was corrected by local law enforcement on the spot.

When asked about the incident, the state released the following statement via email and confirmed that his license is no longer marked as deceased:

"The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles is the state repository for crash reports, which means we can only enter what is provided to us from law enforcement.  If law enforcement incorrectly coded the crash report to show Mr. Ramos was deceased, they would need to submit a corrected crash report to the Department for the correction."

Ramos said he has received an updated record, and the state actually took the accident off his record entirely.

"So I was dead, not knowingly for X amount of years since 2019 to 2022 that I started looking into it," Ramos said. "And then from 2022 to 2023 actually fighting to come back to life."