Not about basketball, still sad/good news?

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=5410475

ESPN.com news services

PHOENIX — Women’s soccer players from the University of Evansville had planned to travel to Arizona for a teammate’s funeral. Now they’re dealing with a full gamut of emotions after receiving word that she’s alive.

Evansville athletic director John Stanley said the players were grief-stricken when told last week that 19-year-old Abby Guerra had been killed in an Arizona traffic crash. They had expected to attend her funeral on Monday.

Guerra
Guerra

But that changed when word came there had been a case of mistaken identity.

“We have confirmed that Abby did not die in the accident,” Stanley said Sunday, according to the Evansville Courier & Press. “Yesterday, Abby’s parents learned that a young woman lying in a hospital bed in Arizona was in fact their daughter, and the parents of the other girl learned that the daughter they thought was hospitalized was in fact deceased.”

Guerra’s friend, 21-year-old Marlena Cantu, actually died in the crash. The mix-up was discovered Saturday.

Guerra’s Evansville teammates are in Phoenix to support her and her family, Stanley said.

Guerra is a nursing major and this fall was scheduled to begin her sophomore year. She was listed in critical condition on Sunday at a Phoenix-area hospital, the Arizona Republic reported.

Evansville students and faculty received the news in an e-mail sent before a news conference announcing the mistaken identity, the Courier & Press reported.

Cantu and Guerra were part of a group of high school friends on the way home from Disneyland last Sunday when the SUV they were riding in suffered a tire blowout. Officials incorrectly stated that Guerra had died at the scene. A male victim died after being hospitalized and two other passengers — including one believed at the time to be Cantu — were hospitalized with severe head trauma.

A benefit car wash for the two families was held on Sunday in Glendale.

“We’ve already paid for the funeral for tomorrow,” Guerra’s aunt, Dorenda Cisneros, said Sunday at the car wash, according to the Arizona Republic. “Never, ever, ever did we have one inclination that she may be alive.”

Marlena Cantu’s family was reeling from the discovery that she had died.

“You don’t hear this in real life,” her uncle, Louis Macias, said, according to the report. “It’s devastating. I don’t know what else to say.”

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.