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A couple from Boston is suing a hospital for losing the remains of their premature baby just days before the young infant’s funeral service.
According to multiple reports, Alana Ross and Daniel McCarthy welcomed their daughter Everleigh Victoria McCarthy three months premature at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston on July 25, 2020. After her difficult delivery, Everleigh suffered from multiple “medical complications” and was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit. Days later, the medical staff informed Ross and McCarthy that their daughter would not survive.
Medical staff insured the grieving parents that Everleigh’s remains would be kept safe in the hospital morgue as they prepared for her funeral service, but on August 10, Ross and McCarthy received a gutwrenching phone call from the Gillooly Funeral Home notifying them that the infant’s remains could not be located by medical officials.
“Every day, when we wake up, one of the first things that goes through our mind is wondering where our daughter is,” Ross and McCarthy said in a statement via their lawyer.
On Thursday, the couple filed a lawsuit in Suffolk County Superior Court citing “negligence” and ” intentional infliction of emotional distress” against 14 staffers from Brigham.
According to the lawsuit, a staffer placed Everleigh’s swaddled body on a metal rack, which Alana and Daniel argue in their suit is “not the appropriate or designated place for the delivery of infant remains to the morgue,” NBC News noted.
Officials later discovered that the pathologist working inside the morgue accidentally mistook the young baby’s remains for soiled linen and threw it into a soiled linen container.
In a recent interview, the pathologist reportedly told officials that the child’s remains were “not left in the right location,” was “wrapped in a blanket” and had “no identifying markers on the outside of the blanket,” the lawsuit stated. The pathologist also added that the “mistakes of other people who have access to the morgue set [off] a chain of events that were unavoidable.”
Ross and McCarthy aren’t suing for any specific monetary amount in the lawsuit. They hope for a fair jury trial and want to prevent the hospital from making another terrible mistake to someone else’s loved one.
“It was traumatic when she passed away, but we’ve been re-traumatized when we learned that the hospital threw her away like trash. We think about it every day and we want to ensure nothing like this is ever suffered by another family,” they added.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital chief medical officer Dr. Sunil Eappen apologized to the family for the devastating incident.
“We continue to express our deepest sympathies and most sincere apologies to the Ross and McCarthy family for their loss and the heartbreaking circumstances surrounding it,” her statement read.
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