Dead Again: This Funeral Is For Real
01-05-1995 Times Picayune

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Four years ago, a grief-stricken Carolyn Collins looked at a
picture of a bruised, dead body and identified it as that of her
missing daughter. She went home and made funeral arrangements,
but that night Thelma Collins showed up alive.

This week, the Orleans Parish coroner's office again showed
Carolyn Collins a photograph of a dead body and asked if it was
her daughter. This time, there was no mistake.

"I'm so upset," she said Wednesday. "It reminded me of the last
time. Only this time she's really dead."

The body of Thelma Collins, 22, was found Monday night in a dump
bin at North Broad and Lafitte streets. The coroner's office
said tests are being done to determine how she died.

For Carolyn Collins, it was like a nightmare revisited.

"She had been missing for about two weeks when they found a girl
out on Old Gentilly Road," the unidentified victim of a traffic
accident, she said.

"We saw it on television the next day and went to the coroner's
office. They showed us pictures and the woman in the picture was
small and favored my daughter. With the bruises, I mistook her
for my daughter," she said.

That was Tuesday, Nov. 20, 1990, and Collins called a funeral
home and arranged for services to be held that Friday.

That night, her daughter came home.

"She said she had been to drug rehab all that time," Collins
said.

Collins said her daughter has fought a long-standing crack
addiction, attending three drug rehabilitation clinics.

"When she feels like she's gone too far, she takes herself and
puts herself in a clinic," Collins said.

When she leaves the clinic, "Sometimes she'll stay home a week
or even a month, but then she goes out on the street again,"
said Collins, who has been raising her daughter's two children,
a 3-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl.

Saturday, Thelma Collins came home to change clothes, and her
mother tried to persuade her to stay home.

When she didn't hear from her daughter, she just thought she was
on the streets again.

But Thelma Collins' body, without identification, was found in
the dump bin shortly after 11 p.m. by a man who was about to put
some trash in it, police said.

John Gagliano, chief investigator for the coroner's office, said
someone in the neighborhood where her body was found told the
coroner's office who the dead woman was and where she lived, in
the 7th Ward on North Robertson Street.