After a California hospital told them their daughter had taken her own life against medical advice, the panicked family spent a year searching for her, only to discover that her body had been decomposing in the hospital morgue, according to a new lawsuit.
Jesse Peterson, 31, died last April at Mercy San Juan Medical Center outside Sacramento after being admitted for treatment for Type 1 diabetes that he had been diagnosed with for many years, according to a negligence lawsuit filed this month.
But her grieving relatives claim the hospital failed to inform them of her death and instead rushed her body to a storage facility, where it was left forgotten in a freezer for months.
They only recently learned of Peterson’s fate after a year of painstaking efforts to report her disappearance to police, post fliers, call friends and canvass areas she frequented in an attempt to track her down, according to court documents.
“Mercy San Juan is “Jessie was taken to an off-site warehouse morgue and left to rot for nearly a year while her family persistently inquired about her whereabouts,” the lawsuit states.
At that point, Peterson’s body was “too severely decomposed to permit an open-casket funeral,” according to the lawsuit, and fingerprints could not be taken for a keepsake.
The lawsuit, which seeks $5 million in damages, also states that her body was “so discolored that her tattoos were unrecognizable.”
According to the lawsuit, Peterson was diagnosed with diabetes at age 10 and received regular treatment, but experienced a worsening of diabetes-related symptoms and was hospitalized on April 6, 2023.
Two days later, she called her mother, Ginger Khondji, and asked her to come pick her up, according to the lawsuit.
However, when her mother arrived at the hospital, she was told that Peterson’s medical records showed that she had discharged herself on April 8 against medical advice.
Over the next few months, Peterson’s mother and two sisters began a “relentless” search for their missing relatives, according to the lawsuit.
According to court documents, on April 12, more than a year after the family believed she had disappeared, detectives with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office contacted them to inform them her body had been found in one of Mercy San Juan’s off-site storage facilities.
According to the lawsuit, Peterson’s death certificate, which was not signed until April of this year when her body was discovered, states that she died of “cardiac arrest” at age 31.
Her relatives claim that because it took a year for them to be informed of her death, an autopsy could not be carried out to rule out possible medical malpractice.
“Defendants failed to issue a timely death certificate, failed to notify Jesse’s next of kin, failed to permit an autopsy, and mishandled Jesse’s body. [was] “It was negligent, careless and heartless,” the lawsuit states.
“While a non-survivable patient may be just another body to Mercy San Juan Hospital, Jessie was a family member, a daughter, a sister and someone who deserved the dignity and respect that Mercy San Juan Hospital was unable to provide.”
Her family is seeking more than $5 million in damages.
The Post reached out to Dignity Health, which operates Mercy San Juan, but did not immediately receive a response.
