A California mother who spent months looking for her son said she discovered his body had been discarded in a morgue “like a piece of trash.”
Renee Lim’s son Ryan, 19, disappeared on Nov. 7 after sending his mother a text message in the morning. The mom spent the next five months desperately searching the San Diego area in hopes of finding him.
Family and friends plastered flyers all around, according to the Sacramento Bee, and contacted homeless shelters and organizations, but he never showed up.
Around a month into the search, a detective told Lim she should ring the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Officer and ask if her son’s body was there, the Bee reported.
On Dec. 7, the scared mother, who was “consumed by fear” made the call no parent wants to. She told the examiner what her son looked like, including “four clearly visible, bright, and unique tattoos” that he designed him, her legal claim – filed on Tuesday – said.
However, the examiner came back to the desperate mom with negative answers, saying no one matched the description in their database. A woman that Lim spoke to “assured Ms. Lim that if Ryan had come to their office, he would have been identified by the thumbprint he provided for his license,” according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Despite the claims for the fingerprint, the medical examiner’s office did have an unidentified body in its possession and one that belonged to Ryan.
Lim would only come to find out her son’s body was there on Apr. 5 after her son’s friend noticed a description on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System that matched Ryan’s. He had been in the medical examiner’s custody this entire time.
“Ryan had been left alone and discarded like a piece of trash,” Lim said, according to the Sacramento Bee.
“Nobody had an explanation as to why my son sat there and unidentified for all that time… nobody cared enough is the reason, I think,” the distraught mother told McClatchy News.
“He was just a beautiful, beautiful kid and did not deserve to be discarded and treated the way he was by the medical examiner’s office,” she said at a news conference. “He sat in a body bag for five months, and nobody cared enough to figure out who he was.”
His body was so decomposed that Lim was advised not to look at her son, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Lim and Ryan’s father and brother William and Brody Lim have now filed a $5 million claim against San Diego County, accusing the medical examiner of making no effort to identify Ryan’s body.
“Somebody made a decision that my son didn’t warrant any further investigation to figure out who he was,” the mother-of-two said.
Ryan was a former addict who was in recovery. Lim believes that may have been a reason behind the delay in identifying him.
The county has 45 days to respond to their claim before the family will filed it as a lawsuit, according to the Bee.
The family remembers Ryan as having a “beautiful soul’ and someone who “lived life to the fullest.” He liked to surf and skateboard and was very creative, according to his mother.
Ryan died on Nov. 7 and was found lifeless on a sidewalk in San Diego. The medical examiner determined his cause of death was from an overdose of fentanyl, methamphetamine and two prescription medications, according to the Bee.