A grieving family is suing a California hospital for leading them on a hopeless search to find their daughter, who they were told was alive when she was actually dead for the entire time. In April 2023, the family of 31-year-old Jessie Peterson was told that she had checked herself out of the Mercy San Juan Medical Center against medical advice after initially admitting herself for treatment for her Type 1 diabetes.
The family spent a year looking for her, but according to a negligence suit, came to discover that her body had been decomposing in the morgue.
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The lawsuit says that the hospital did not inform the family about Peterson's death, and that their actions of quickly shipping her off to the morgue led to her body being forgotten. According to the New York Post, court papers detail that the family spent a year reporting her missing to police, posting missing person flyers, reaching out to friends, and searching the areas Peterson frequented. The family was later informed by a detective that the woman's body had been found in the morgue.
"Mercy San Juan stored Jessie in an off-site warehouse morgue and she was left to decompose for nearly a year while her family relentlessly inquired about her whereabouts," the lawsuit reads, adding that her body was "so decomposed that an open casket funeral was not feasible” and her fingerprints were unable to be obtained for any keepsakes. The lawsuit also said that Peterson was “so discolored that her tattoos could not be identified."
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Peterson’s death certificate lists her cause of death as "cardiopulmonary arrest," and it was only signed in April 2024 when her body was found. However, the family claims that they're unable to do an autopsy to rule out any possible medical malpractice due to it taking a year to be informed about her death.
"Defendants’ failure to issue a timely certificate of death, failure to notify Jessie’s next of kin, failure to allow an autopsy, and mishandling of Jessie’s remains [was] negligent, careless, and heartless," the lawsuit, which is seeking more than $5 million in damages, reads. "While a patient that doesn’t survive may be just another lifeless body to Mercy San Juan hospital, Jessie was a family member, daughter, and sister, all of whom deserved the dignity and respect Mercy San Juan grossly failed to provide."
