Yes, he was alive and they thought he was dead despite the facts many people told them
Questions haunt town after 'dead' man found alive
INGLESIDE, North Carolina (AP) -- Larry Green stepped out of the darkness so suddenly that the car that hit him didn't even leave skid marks. The impact sent his shoes, socks and the unopened beer in his hand flying.
Green came to rest on U.S. 401 alongside a trash-strewn ditch, where he was examined by paramedics and declared dead.
Over the next 2 1/2 hours, the bloody body with a gaping head wound was zipped into a black vinyl bag, taken to the morgue and slid into a stainless-steel refrigerated drawer.
There was just one problem: Green was alive.
Two weeks after that shocking discovery, the 29-year-old Green clings to life in a hospital intensive care unit, paralyzed...
https://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/11/not.dead.yet.ap/index.html
This has been a personal worry of mine all my life. I remember learning in school as a young child how it wasn't uncommon for people to be buried who weren't really dead because they didn't have the same medical technology then we have now so they couldn't tell the person was just in a coma or unconscious.
This is a real shame. This guy would have been dead soon, if they hadn't discovered this. Once they embalmed him, that would have been that. With the description of how bad his head injury was, chances are he wouldn't have a complete recovery anyway, but now we will never know. How much worse has his condition been made because of how he was treated at the scene of the accident and afterwards at the morgue?
Being buried alive is actually pretty common, not so much anymore, because embalming finished you off if you weren't dead to begin with, but it used to happen lots.
Here's an interesting article with a lot of information about being buried alive. It's a pretty creepy thought