The family of a woman who died in a California hospital in 2023 said in a lawsuit that they had not been informed that she had died, leading the family members to believe she had been alive and missing for nearly a year.
Jessie Peterson, 31, had been admitted to Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento, for treatment in April 2023, but her family was not notified when she died, according to a lawsuit filed this month in the Sacramento County Superior Court by her mother and sisters. Instead, the lawsuit said, Ms. Peterson’s mother had been told that her daughter had been discharged against medical advice.
It took another year for Ms. Peterson’s family to learn that she had died.
“We’re still very sad, and we still don’t have any answers,” Ms. Peterson’s mother, Ginger Congi, said in a video interview. “It’s hard to not be angry.”
The last time Ms. Congi spoke to her daughter was on April 8, 2023, when Ms. Peterson called her and asked to be picked up from the hospital. She had been admitted two days earlier, on April 6, 2023, for a diabetic episode. Ms. Peterson was pronounced dead less than two hours after she called her mother, according to the lawsuit, and her body was transferred to a cold storage facility the next day.
Ms. Congi, who was listed as Ms. Peterson’s next of kin, called the hospital on April 11, 2023, and asked to be transferred to her daughter’s room, but was told there was no one there with her name, according to the lawsuit. Her mother asked more questions and was told that her daughter had left against medical advice.
Mercy San Juan Medical Center is operated by Dignity Health and owned by CommonSpirit Health. Dignity Health declined to comment on the lawsuit but said it extended its “deepest sympathies to the family during this difficult time.”
Ms. Peterson’s family contacted people that Ms. Peterson had lived with, posted flyers and spoke to homeless people and law enforcement in the area to see if they had seen Ms. Peterson, the lawsuit said. They 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. Ms. Congi also contacted the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office, but was not able to find her daughter.
Ms. Congi said that Ms. Peterson had done dance, gymnastics and water polo as a child but had to scale back her activities after being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 10. In recent years, she had enjoyed traveling around California, particularly to the coast, but had struggled with drug addiction.
“She would go for a year where she was doing really, really good,” Ms. Congi said. “And then she would take that step backwards.”
Ms. Congi said that even when her daughter was struggling, she always stayed in contact.
On April 12, 2024, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office told Ms. Peterson’s family that she had been found dead at the hospital, the lawsuit said, but it was still not clear to the family where her body was.
Ms. Congi and one of Ms. Peterson’s sisters contacted the coroner’s office and several departments at the hospital to find her remains, the lawsuit said. On April 15, 2024, the East Lawn mortuary contacted Ms. Congi and said that her daughter’s body was at one of Mercy San Juan’s off-site storage facilities.
The lawsuit said it was no longer possible to perform an autopsy to determine if medical malpractice had occurred, because of the length of time from when Ms. Peterson died to when her body was discovered. Ms. Peterson’s body was so decomposed that an open-coffin funeral was not feasible.
Ms. Congi said she still did not know whether Ms. Peterson had been discharged when she died or was still being treated. The family’s lawyer, Marc R. Greenberg, said that adding to the confusion, there were discrepancies in the medical records, including a document that compared an X-ray taken in April 2023 to one taken in May 2023, after Ms. Peterson died.
“We’ll never know what really happened,” Mr. Greenberg said.
It is also not clear why Ms. Peterson’s family was finally notified of her death in April. Ms. Peterson’s death certificate, which was provided to The New York Times by Mr. Greenberg, was signed on April 4, 2024, and said Ms. Peterson died on April 8, 2023, of cardiopulmonary arrest. Under California law, the hospital was legally required to issue a death certificate within 15 hours.
The doctor who signed her death certificate was the doctor on duty when Ms. Peterson died, according to records provided by Mr. Greenberg. The doctor, Nadeem Mukhtar, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The family’s negligence lawsuit against the hospital and its owner seeks $5 million in actual damages and $10 million in punitive damages.
Ms. Congi said that she had filed the lawsuit after getting little information from the hospital about her daughter, though said she did not think her biggest question would ever be answered. Ms. Congi said, “I’d really like to know what happened to Jessie when she was breathing her last moments.”
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