Family's year-long search for missing California woman ends with tragic discovery

A California family's years-long search for their daughter, who they believed went missing after leaving the hospital against medical advice, ended with the tragic discovery that she had been lying dead and decomposing in the hospital morgue all along, according to a lawsuit filed earlier this month.

Jessie Peterson, 31, was admitted to Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, California, a suburb of Sacramento, in April 2023 after suffering a diabetic attack related to Type 1 diabetes, which she was diagnosed with at age 10, according to the negligence lawsuit filed by her mother and sisters in Sacramento County Superior Court.

The hospital told Peterson's family that she was discharged two days later against doctor's advice, the lawsuit says.

Unable to locate Peterson, the 31-year-old's family began a “tireless” search and reported her missing to the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office, the lawsuit states.

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Jessie Peterson, 31, had been lying dead in a hospital morgue for a year while her family was led to believe she had disappeared, according to the negligence lawsuit the family filed earlier this month. (Sacramento County Sheriff's Office)

A year later, they learned that Peterson had never left the hospital.

On April 12, detectives notified the family that Peterson's body had been found at Mercy San Juan Medical Center, where it had been stored in “an off-site storage facility” and left to deteriorate for over a year, the lawsuit says.

“At this point, Jessie's body was so decomposed that an open burial was not possible and Jessie's fingerprints were not even present as a keepsake,” the lawsuit states. Her body was also “so discolored that her tattoos could not be identified,” the lawsuit states.

Peterson's death certificate, issued more than a year after her death, states that she died of cardiac arrest at the age of 31.

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However, because there had been no news of her death for a year, an autopsy to determine whether medical malpractice was a cause of her death was not possible, the lawsuit states.

Peterson's family is now demanding more than five million dollars in damages.

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Dignity Health, operator of Mercy San Juan Medical Center, did not immediately respond to Fox Digital's request for comment on the matter.