Over the years, although I’d love for someone to say I reminded them of Brad Pitt, I’ve been told I look remind people of Richard Dreyfuss, Jerry Springer and Harry Saslovsky (I have no idea who that is but it is not heartening). But there are cases where mistaken identity can be almost deadly.
A woman who almost died after her boyfriend mistook her for a hog on a camping trip and shot her has revealed that the couple are closer than ever.
Lisa Simmons, 51, was looking for sour oranges in the woods in Flagler County, Florida in April last year as her boyfriend sought out hogs when she was knocked to the ground in pain.
Simmons, who has worked as a nurse for heart doctors for 18 years, looked down to see she had been shot through the thighs and was quickly losing blood.
‘I don’t want to die out here in these woods,’ she thought, she told the Tampa Bay Times.
She called out for her boyfriend, Steve Egan, and used his belt to make a tourniquet as they called 911 from their cell phone.
Egan frantically apologized and told her how much he loved her as they waited.
And then there was a case of a man apparently mistaken for a turkey — hard to believe, unless the guy was a member of Congress:
As a turkey hunter for the last 24 years, Washington County sheriff’s commander Jerry Cusick never thought for a moment he would go from hunter to the hunted while walking the woods of western Wisconsin on Tuesday.
In mere seconds he had approximately 50 BBs from a shotgun sprayed into his face, chest and arms, taking out a front tooth and lodging one pellet behind his eye.
(Was Dick Cheney around?)
Mr Cusick, 53, collapsed to the ground covered in blood and cried out to whoever was upon him, but says he heard no reply back.
‘It spun me around, knocked my hat off,’ he told the Mohr Pioneer Press on Wednesday. ‘I ducked down and saw blood was streaming down. I screamed, “You shot me! You shot me!”
‘I would liken it to somebody hitting you upside the head with a baseball bat, and you didn’t expect it was coming,’ he said.
Mr Cusick, who has served 28-years with the sheriff’s office and also teaches classes on turkey hunting safety, was scouting private land in St. Croix County for an upcoming turkey hunt when hit.
This isn’t to say that there are not examples that just scream “separated at birth.”
For instance, Texas. Sen. Ted Cruz:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.