California family searches for woman found dead in hospital storage room
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) — The family of a 31-year-old Sacramento woman who died at a hospital said they had been searching for their loved one for a year while her body remained in refrigerated storage all that time.
In a new lawsuit, the family of Jessie Marie Peterson alleges that Dignity Health never contacted them after Peterson died while under the care of Mercy San Juan Medical Center staff in 2023. Instead, the family claims they were falsely told Peterson had been released from the hospital.
It wasn't until a year after Peterson's death that sheriff's detectives told her family that a woman's body had been found at the hospital, and Dignity Health never apologized to the family for what happened, according to the lawsuit.
“All I could think was she was lying on the side of the river, alone, decomposing, in a freezer in some storage facility all this time. When we found out, we were pretty shocked,” Peterson's mother, Ginger Khondji, said.
According to the lawsuit, the hospital advertises that it “treats everyone with dignity and respect.” In this case, “dignity and respect were absent,” court documents state.
Peterson's mother and sisters filed the lawsuit in Sacramento County Superior Court on August 7. The suit alleges negligence, infliction of emotional distress by mishandling a body and violations of California's health and safety laws, and seeks more than $5 million in damages and a jury trial.
In a statement to Sacramento television station KCRA about the lawsuit, Dignity Health said, “We offer our deepest condolences to the family during this difficult time. We cannot comment on pending litigation.”
According to the lawsuit, Peterson, who graduated from Roseville High School and attended Sierra College, had Type 1 diabetes since age 10. Conge said Peterson received regular treatment at Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Sacramento.
According to court documents, she was hospitalized on April 6, 2023, for a diabetic attack and died two days later.
According to the timeline in the lawsuit, Peterson called her mother at 2:50 p.m. on April 8, 2023, asking her to come pick her up because she was being discharged from the hospital.
“She wanted me to come and pick her up,” Kongi said. “She wanted to leave the hospital. I told her this was the best place to get the best care she needed. She needed to stay here.”
Peterson was pronounced dead at 4:27 p.m. that day, according to the lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit, Khondji called the hospital on April 11, 2023, to speak with her daughter and was told to leave the hospital against medical advice.
“They said there is no one by that name, so I asked them to check again, because I had just met her a week ago, I spoke to her on the phone, I gave them her name and the man on the phone said, 'Um, there is no one by that name here,'” Kongi said.
The lawsuit alleges that the hospital moved the body to a refrigerated facility on April 9, 2023, and did not issue a death certificate until April 4, 2024, 361 days after the death. The lawsuit claims the death certificate should have been issued within 15 hours of the death.
In an effort to find Peterson, her family filed a missing person's report with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office and posted her information on the Department of Justice's missing persons website. They also contacted the county coroner to inquire about Peterson.
On April 12, 2024, detectives called the family to inform them that her body had been found, and it was later discovered that the body was located in one of Mercy San Juan's off-site storage facilities.
“At this point, Jesse's body was so advanced in decomposition that an open casket funeral was not possible, and Jesse's fingerprints could not even be obtained as a keepsake,” the lawsuit states.
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