A panicked family spent a year looking for their daughter after a California hospital told them she had checked herself out against medical advice — just to finally find out she’d been decomposing in its morgue the entire time, a new lawsuit alleges.
Jessie Peterson, 31, died at the Mercy San Juan Medical Center, just outside Sacramento, in April last year after admitting herself for treatment for her long-diagnosed Type 1 diabetes, according to a negligence suit filed this month.
Her grief-stricken relatives, however, claim the hospital failed to inform them about her death and instead quickly shipped her body off to its storage facility, where she would lie forgotten in a freezer for months.
They only recently learned of Peterson’s fate after spending a painstaking year reporting her missing to cops, posting flyers, calling friends and canvassing the area she frequented in a bid to track her down, court papers charge.
“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 states.
By that time, Peterson’s body was “so decomposed that an open casket funeral was not feasible” and her fingerprints couldn’t be obtained for any keepsakes, the lawsuit says.
nypost.com
