Family claims woman was frozen alive in morgue

A California appeals court has revived a malpractice suit brought by the family of an 80-year-old grandmother they claim was prematurely declared dead by doctors then frozen alive inside a body bag in the hospital’s morgue.

A lower-court judge had dismissed the lawsuit brought in May 2012 by relatives of Maria de Jesus Arroyo against White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles over the woman’s 2010 death, on grounds that the statute of limitations had lapsed.

But a three-judge panel of a state appeals court sided with the family this week in agreeing they could not have known how Arroyo was alleged to have died until it was brought to light by a pathologist in an expert opinion he gave in December 2011.

“Plaintiffs had absolutely no reason to suspect the decedent was alive rather than dead when placed in the hospital morgue,” the court said. The lawsuit now goes back to Los Angeles Superior Court.

The origins of the case date to July 26, 2011, when doctors pronounced Arroyo dead from cardiac arrest shortly after she was brought to the hospital by ambulance.

Employees of a funeral home chosen by the family to pick up the woman’s remains from the hospital morgue later discovered her lying face down in a body bag half-unzipped, with bruises and gashes to her face and a broken nose, according to the court record.

Family members who had seen Arroyo’s face without injuries just after she was pronounced dead assumed her corpse had been mishandled by hospital morgue workers.

The family went on to file a negligence suit in January 2011 claiming the hospital was to blame for mutilating their loved one’s body.

But Dr William Manion, a New Jersey pathologist, reached a far more horrific conclusion.

He said Arroyo had been prematurely declared dead and was placed alive in the freezer of the morgue where she eventually regained consciousness due to the extreme cold and “damaged her face and turned herself face down as she struggled unsuccessfully to escape her frozen tomb”.

The hospital declined to comment on the case, except to say that “we continue to disagree with the allegations being made”.