Death & Jeff Markin
Jeff Markin was a fifty-three-year-old auto mechanic who walked into the emergency room at Palm Beach Gardens Hospital in Florida and collapsed from a heart attack on October 20, 2006.
For around 40 minutes, the emergency room personnel desperately tried to revive him, shocking him seven times with a defibrillator, but he remained flatlined.
Finally, the supervising cardiologist, Chauncey Crandall, a well-respected, Yale-educated doctor and medical school professor who specialized in complex heart cases, was brought in to examine the body. Markin’s face, toes, and fingers had already turned black from the lack of oxygen. His pupils were dilated and fixed. There was no point in trying to resuscitate him. Then, at 8:05 p.m., he was declared dead.
Crandall filled out the final report and turned to leave. But he quickly felt an extraordinary compulsion. “I sensed God was telling me to turn around and pray for the patient,” he said later. This seemed silly, so he tried to ignore it, only to receive a second—and even stronger prompting he believed was from God. A nurse was who was already disconnecting the intravenous fluids and sponging the body so it could be taken to the morgue. However, Crandall began praying over the corpse: “Father God, I cry out for the soul of this man. If he does not know you as his Lord and Savior, please raise him from the dead right now in Jesus’ name.”
Crandall told the emergency room doctor to use the paddle to shock the corpse one more time. Seeing nothing to gain, the doctor protested. “I’ve shocked him again and again. He’s dead.” But then he complied out of respect for his colleague. Instantly, the monitor jumped from flatline to a normal heartbeat of about seventy-five beats per minute with a healthy rhythm.
“In my more than twenty years as a cardiologist, I have never seen a heartbeat restored so completely and suddenly,” Crandall said. Markin immediately began breathing without any assistance, and the blackness receded from his face, toes, and fingers. The nurse as a result panicked because she feared the patient would be permanently disabled from oxygen deprivation, alas he never showed any signs of brain damage.
This case got a lot of attention in the media
One medical consultant for a national news program suggested that perhaps Markin’s heart had not stopped completely but had gone into a very subtle rhythm for those forty minutes.
Crandall’s response to this paper was he was grasping at straws. The resuscitation couldn’t have happened naturally. An electrical shock administered in those circumstances would not normally accomplish anything. The unanimous verdict of those actually present was that Markin was deceased, and that includes Crandall, who is a nationally recognized cardiologist with many years of experience.
Video interview with the doctor
Newspaper(s)
