A grandmother was prematurely declared dead by doctors and frozen alive in a morgue according to her family.
In 2010, 80-year-old Maria de Jesus Arroy was pronounced dead by doctors, before her body was taken to a morgue where her family claim she regained consciousness and was frozen alive.
Funeral home workers found the woman’s body face down, with her nose broken and bruises and gashes on her face, and the body bag half unzipped when they went to pick up the body.
Arroy’s relatives, who had seen her body after she was declared dead without any facial injuries, initially believed her corpse had been mishandled by morgue workers and filed a negligence suit against the company.
However, pathologist Dr William Manion examined the body and claims Arroy regained consciousness and self-inflicted her injuries unsuccessfully struggling to escape from her “frozen tomb”.
Due to Dr Manion’s report, the family have dropped the negligence suit against the morgue, and are pursuing a claim against White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles for malpractice and wrongful death. This claim was initially dismissed by a lower-court judge in 2012, on grounds that the statute of limitations had lapsed, but judges at a state appeals court agreed that the family could not have known about the circumstances until Dr Manion’s examination in December 2011.
White Memorial Hospital denies the claims.
