SAN DIEGO — Renee Lim is still grieving the loss of her 19-year-old son, Ryan, who died of a fentanyl overdose, and adding to that pain is the fact that she searched for months while his body was at the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office the entire time.
“Five months of the anxiety and the worrying and the hoping, it’s hard to find words to describe just how deep that pain is,” said Lim. “Your biggest fear is something happening to your child and not knowing where my son was, just the trauma of not knowing, of thinking he was alive.”
While Renee lives up north in Lafayette, CA, Ryan was here in San Diego last year while in treatment for substance abuse until he relapsed and was found unresponsive on a sidewalk downtown before being rushed to UCSD Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead on November 7, 2022.
“It’s actually very difficult to think of life without Ryan in it, but he was just a beautiful, beautiful kid and did not deserve to be discarded and treated the way he was,” said Lim.
Ryan’s body was brought to the Medical Examiner’s Office on November 7, but it sat there unidentified until April of this year. Lim says she called the office in December, describing him and his tattoos, but was told he wasn’t there. It wasn’t until a friend of Ryan’s found his picture on the NamUs website for missing and unidentified persons that Renee realized where he was.
“They have a statutory duty to identify cause of death, a statutory duty to identify the person and identify next of kin. This is their job,” said Marc Greenburg, attorney for the Lim family, who filed a legal claim against the County of San Diego Tuesday. “Five months they sat on a blood sample and did not even try to find cause of death. They didn’t do anything. They just didn’t care.”
In April, blood sample testing showed that Ryan had fentanyl in his system and the cause of death was determined to be an accident. A spokesperson for the County told CBS 8 that “In fiscal year 2022-23, the Department of the Medical Examiner’s Office identified 83% of John and Jane Doe decedents within 72 hours.”
“They could’ve run the fingerprint against DMV,” said Greenburg. “They could’ve done that on Day 1 and Ryan would’ve been identified and Renee would not have spent months, days upon days looking for her son, it’s just outrageous.”
Renee now lives with the pain of not having been able to say goodbye to her son one last time because of the deterioration of his body over many months.
“When the mortician said that I shouldn’t see Ryan, it really just broke my heart that I couldn’t even see my son one last time,” said Lim.