Jennifer Jordan, 25, was the first one in her family to graduate college. She worked as a nurse on the fourth floor at Wyoming Medical Center, and loved her job. She loved horses too, was getting back into barrel racing, and had just purchased a horse of her own last week.

She died in a car accident Saturday, and since then the horse has been given a name -- Jen's Dream -- her boyfriend Tyler Johnson said. Jen's Dream now belongs to her two children, Sondra Jordan, 3, and J.D. Jordan, 2, who Johnson vowed would never forget the woman he loved.

But authorities at the scene of the accident didn't know any of that. All they knew about the victim was that she was Jennifer Jordan of Casper.

That lack of information and a highly improbable series of coincidences led to the wrong Casper family being notified of the death of the wrong Jennifer Jordan.

For a brief but grueling few hours Saturday morning, Debbie Clark thought her daughter, Jennifer Jordan, 23, had died in a car accident in Sheridan. She hadn't spoken to her daughter in two years, and thoughts of missed opportunities engulfed her as the Mills police officer informed her of the death at 2:30 in the morning Saturday.

"I didn't get to say I'm sorry or tell her I love her," Clark said Tuesday, her daughter at her side.

Then came denial. The officer, Bryan McLimore, told her the wreck had happened near Sheridan. Though she hadn't spoken with her in years, Clark didn't see any reason why she'd be on the highway outside of Sheridan at 2 in the morning.

McLimore continued to tell Clark that her daughter had died. The physical description matched. The birthday matched. Clark said McLimore began to tear up as he tried to pass on the news.

He had been informed of the death by the Sheridan County Coroner's Office, which was trying to identify the accident victim with only a name and the wrong Jennifer Jordan's driver's license information to go by. As a result, the officer knocked on the wrong family's door.

McLimore was not on duty Tuesday, and could not be reached for comment.

Ferries described it as a logical mistake that had never happened before during his time as coroner.

Jennifer A. Jordan, 25, died at the scene of the Friday accident after the van she was traveling in east on Interstate 90 rolled. She was a passenger in the�vehicle and did not have any identification on her at the time, according to Sgt. Stephen Townsend of the Wyoming Highway Patrol. Before being flown to Billings, Mont., for further treatment, the driver of the vehicle told authorities only that the victim was Jennifer Jordan of Casper.

Townsend said a database search of Casper-area driver's licenses turned up only one Jennifer Jordan. She had blonde hair, green eyes, stood 62 inches and registered as a Class 2, or petite, in weight. The victim's measurements were off by an inch in height, Ferries said. The rest matched up.

The heart tattoos on the smalls of their back were identical, too. The Wyoming Highway Patrol trooper who responded to the wreck called Jennifer Sue Jordan Tuesday and said he'd looked at pictures of both. (Jordan said the picture was probably taken while she was in a sheriff's cadet program.)

You want to notify the family as soon as possible, Ferries said. Even a day is too long. And of course you want to be right, too, he said.

With the matching physical descriptions and only one Jennifer Jordan from Casper to choose from in the database, Ferries said there were no questions about mistaken identity. If one had been 5-foot-10 and the other 5-foot-6, that would be enough to draw suspicion, he said.

"Nobody's thinking that it's not her," he said.

Jennifer Sue Jordan's family did.

Clark called her son, Patrick Christensen, who began to call family members and tried to get in touch with his missing sister as well. Jodi Borino, his and Jordan's sister, said that Jordan had been fixing a computer at her house that night at 10:30. If she was in Sheridan by 2 a.m., she would've had to floor it there.

About an hour after McLimore knocked on the door, Jordan finally answered her cell phone.

"Everybody thinks you're dead," Jordan remembered Borino telling her four minutes into what had been a nonsensical conversation.

"She's been on that computer all night," Jordan said she thought at the time. "She's gone insane."

At the same time, Jordan's dad, Jerry Christensen, called to offer condolences to Phil Jordan, Jennifer's husband.

The couple was sitting next to each other in bed.

Christensen was driving to Casper from Denver as he mentioned making funeral arrangements before Phil Jordan could finally say, "What are you talking about?"

Ferries did not perform the identification, but was awakened Saturday by a phone call regarding the mistaken identification. "We were flabbergasted," Ferries said.

He said his office worked with the few details it had about the victim. That all the descriptions matched, that the one listed Jennifer Jordan from Casper could look just like another Jennifer Jordan from Casper, is a question of odds he said he couldn't answer.

"I'm relieved for that woman," Ferries said, referring to Clark. "She's upset, almost hysterical not knowing why her daughter would be there. I'm relieved that that's over for her."

Ferries said he searched the entire state for Jennifer Jordans, and found seven matches. The family of the victim lived in Sheridan and was notified later Saturday, he said.

In Jennifer Sue Jordan's Casper home Saturday night, men who hadn't cried before cried. Women, black in the face from running mascara, celebrated. The jaws of the two officers who'd come to Jennifer Sue Jordan's house to verify she was alive dropped, Clark said. She spent the rest of the night reconnecting with her daughter.

Clark said Tuesday she felt extreme sorrow for the family of the victim, and offered her condolences for something she couldn't have imagined happening until it accidentally happened to her.

She said she wouldn't be trying to sue anyone for mental duress. She got all she could ask for.

"I've asked for a second chance to say I love you, and I got it," Clark said.

Contact reporter Cory Matteson at (307) 266-0589 or cory.matteson@casperstartribune.net.