SAN DIEGO — Ryan Lim was found lifeless on a San Diego sidewalk from an accidental fentanyl overdose on November 7, 2022.
Ryan's mother, Renee Lim shared text messages from her home in Northern California with her 19-year-old son Ryan earlier that day.
After not hearing from him for days, Renee Lim told CBS 8 that she became concerned.
"As soon as I didn't hear from him, I opened a missing persons report," Lim told CBS 8. "I followed up with the detective assigned to the case."
However, police had no records of Ryan Lim.
Renee Lim then called the San Diego County Medical Examiner's office to check if Ryan's body was there.
"I told them he's a white kid, he's got dreadlocks. He probably looks about, probably 16 or 17, super fit. I also described his tattoos," said Ms. Lim. "I'm describing all this. And they say, 'Nope, we don't have them here.'"
The call to the Medical Examiner's Office kept the spark of hope ignited for Renee Lim.
She spent five months leading the search for her son, who she believed was still alive.
"I felt in my heart something had happened," remembered Lim. "But having the Medical Examiner's Office telling me he wasn't there just gave me this hope that he was okay. I spent those five months trying to find him thinking like he's, you know, going through this self-discovery."
During that time, Ms. Lim traveled to San Diego and hung missing person posters of Ryan across the city.
In April 2023, one of Ryan's friends called Ms. Lim to let her know that they spotted a photo of Ryan's tattoo on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) website.
Ms. Lim called the San Diego County Medical Examiner and gave a staffer Ryan's Driver's License number. She then hopped on a plane to San Diego.
"By the time I landed in San Diego, they had identified him," said Ms. Lim. "So within hours, they knew it was Ryan. And I don't know how they didn't know that back in November."
Instead, Ms. Lim learned there was an alleged database mix-up at the Medical Examiner's office and Ryan's body had been set aside and "discarded," she said, for more than five months.
"To spend all that time trying to find my son, to find out that he had passed on that same day I was in contact with him," said Ms. Lim. "You think it couldn't get any worse, but it can, and it did."
In May 2024, the County of San Diego settled a lawsuit that Ms. Lim filed for $700,000, as first reported by CBS 8.
She got the accountability she sought, but the payout won't make her whole.
"I felt like a part of my soul died," Ms. Lim says. "I don't think it will ever come back."
While cases like Lim's are rare, there are similar stories of negligence across California.
The Case of Jessie Peterson
On April 8, 2023, Ginger Congi received a phone call from her daughter, Jessie Peterson from the San Juan Medical Center in Sacramento.
Peterson, who was 31 years old at the time, was at the hospital for diabetes-related care. Peterson wanted Congi to pick her up, however, Congi was out of town for work.
A few days had passed and after not hearing from her daughter, Congi called the hospital to check on her daughter.
Hospital staffers told Congi that Peterson checked herself out of the hospital against medical advice and they had no record of her.
Unbeknownst to Congi, her daughter Jessie did not check herself out of the hospital that day. On that day, April 8, Jessie Peterson died, her body was taken to the hospital's storage room.
Unaware of her daughter's death, and not having received any phone call from hospital staff - she was Peterson's emergency contact after all, Congi repeatedly called her daughter's phone and it immediately went to voicemail.
In the days, weeks, and months following, Congi and her family initiated a mass search of the Sacramento area for Peterson. The family called the coroner, and jails. They also filed a missing persons report with the police.
The family searched areas where Jessie had been known to frequent - she was in and out of homelessness, said Congi.
"There wasn't a day that I didn't think about where she might be," Congi told CBS 8. "Sometimes I would have nightmares about her being decomposed on the side of a river. It was awful."
Congi then stumbled across Lim's story in the Sacramento Bee and read it.
"I thought, 'How tragic, that poor woman is suffering, losing her son like that' and them not letting her know he was gone,'" she says. "I thought, 'Oh my goodness, I can be that woman.'"
For months the search for Peterson continued.
On April 4, 2024, only four days shy of a year since Congi last spoke to her daughter, the detective from Sacramento's Missing Persons Unit, called Congi to tell her Peterson's body had been found. Peterson's body had spent a year in an off-site storage facility. The body was so decomposed, that detectives were forced to use the hospital bracelet on her wrist to identify her.
"We're still heartbroken," Congi says. "I'm angry, I'm sad she's no longer with us. I want to hold them accountable for what they've done. I don't want anyone else to have to suffer something like this in the future."
Despite California law requiring a death certificate within 15 hours of someone's passing, Mercy San Juan didn't issue the certificate of death until April 4, 2024. The death certificate was missing a cause of death due to the condition of the body when it was discovered.
Congi has since filed a lawsuit against San Juan Mercy Hospital for negligence.
While the two mothers haven't met, they've felt a similar pain caused by institutional negligence that both say no one should have to experience.
She hopes to receive some accountability from the institution involved, but the grief continues to weigh heavily.
Mark Greenberg, an attorney with Tucker Ellis LLP, represented Lim before he took on Congi's case.
"Sadly, since the San Diego matter on behalf of the Lim family, I've received calls from around the country of similar stories," Greenberg says. "Whether it's just disregard for human life, or people that have passed away, that they've just become immune to the care and the notion of what this does to a family. It needs to change."
How are institutions legally required to handle dead bodies?
In California, the doctor who last attended to the deceased person is required to sign a death certificate within 15 hours.
Once a patient is declared dead by a hospital, the next of kin is supposed to be notified, according to state law. If no family members are found to be contacted, the body is then supposed to be in the Medical Examiner-Coroner custody.
Deaths that are sudden or unexpected are investigated.
In a typical case, an autopsy would be performed within three days of receiving the body. Within two to three days after that, the decedent's next of kin can sign off on their loved one being released to a mortuary or cremation service.
Families looking to file a claim against their county coroner can only act within a six-month window.
Greenberg said he's had to reject cases because they reached the statute of limitations. He called Congi's case specifically "incredibly egregious.
"To misplace a body, or just have a lack of regard for a year," he says. "It's unfathomable."
A spokesperson for Dignity Health, the owner of San Juan Medical Center in Sacramento, told CBS 8, "We extend our deepest sympathies to the family during this difficult time. We are unable to comment on pending litigation.
Meanwhile, a San Diego County spokesperson told CBS 8 that policies have been improved.
Read the statement, "Existing protocols have been improved; now listing more details about tattoos or identifying scars in our database, and double checking the data entry; and the ME’s Office enters John/Jane Doe information into the voluntary national system (the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System “NamUS”) early in the identification process rather than at the end. The ME’s Office is also working to change the case management system to link John/Jane Doe information to Missing Person inquiry information.
The San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office makes every effort to identify the decedent as quickly as possible. The investigators start with fingerprints to identify decedents. They then move to dental records and DNA sequencing. Information is entered into a CA Department of Justice Database, searchable by law enforcement agencies nationwide, and a national database, searchable by anyone. If the person is still unidentified, sketch artists are used whenever possible to create a virtual picture of the decedent for release to the media for help identifying a decedent."
But for Renee Lim, the pain from picturing her son lay in wait, "No family should have to go through something like this," Ms. Lim said. "Whether you lose a child, or a father, or a mother, everyone has someone. No one should be ignored. No one should have their person be ignored like this."
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