SAN DIEGO — San Diego County paid $700,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the mother of a young man who overdosed on fentanyl but remained unidentified in the Medical Examiner's Office for nearly six months.
Public records obtained by CBS 8 showed the county settled the lawsuit on May 10.
The Death of Ryan Lim
Ryan Lim was just 19 years old when his near lifeless body, overtaken by fentanyl, was discovered unconscious on a downtown San Diego sidewalk on November 7, 2022.
Lim's mother, Renee, was never notified.
For more than five months, Renee Lim searched for her missing son but found nothing.
Unbeknownst to Renee Lim, her son's body was lying in the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office Lim's having never been identified or examined to find the cause of death.
In December 2022, Ms. Lim called the Medical Examiner's Office to see if her son's body was there. She was told that no one had died which matched Ryan Lim's description.
They were wrong.
Ryan Lim's body was at the Medical Examiner's. It stayed there, unidentified, until April 2023.
CBS 8 interviewed Ms. Lim in October 2023 after she filed the lawsuit against the County of San Diego.
“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.”
Ms. Lim said her son, an artist and skateboarder had moved to San Diego from Northern California to get clean in 2022.
When Ms. Lim did not hear from her son, she began to call hospitals and authorities, fearing the worst. In December 2022, Ms. Lim called the Medical Examiner's Office and gave the office her son's descriptions along with identifying tattoos on his body. The office told her that 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 the cause of death, a statutory duty to identify the person and identify next of kin. This is their job,” Marc Greenburg, attorney for the Lim family, told CBS 8 in an October 2023 interview. “For five months they sat on a blood sample and did not even try to find the cause of death. They didn’t do anything. They just didn’t care.”
When the office did finally identify her son, Ms. Lim said his body had decomposed so much that she was advised not to see him.
“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,” Ms. Lim told CBS 8 in October.
A blood sample taken from Ryan Lim showed fentanyl in his system. The Medical Examiner ruled the cause of death an accident.
