Tonya Walker’s family last heard from her in October 2023. The mother of four had been unhoused at times, but had never been out of contact before, much less vanished without a trace.
When she was nowhere to be found as Thanksgiving neared, her loved ones launched an exhaustive search for the 51-year-old throughout Sacramento, California, where she lived. The events that unfolded, however, were beyond anything they could have imagined, and at the center of the tragedy was Dignity Health, one of the largest health care systems in the U.S.
The investigation officially began on Nov. 10, when Tonya’s family reported her missing to the police. Her sisters, Dalee Marez and Kalia Zachary, soon jumped into action, distributing hundreds of flyers, searching roadside ditches, and even crawling through storm drains to find her, all while offering a $3,500 reward for information, which unfortunately led to many false leads.
Not ruling out a homicide, the police used a cadaver dog and alerted the Justice Department, requesting they add her to the national missing persons list, reported KCRA 3.
A break in the case did not come until May 2024, seven months later, when the DOJ noticed she had been marked “deceased” by the DMV. A sheriff’s deputy told the family they had finally found Walker’s body on a shelf in a morgue located on the outskirts of Sacramento.
When her sisters arrived at Cremations Only to identify her remains, nothing could have prepared them for what they saw. Walker was missing her eyes and skin, her family told the outlet.
“We identified her through the tattoo on her arm. Her body was in the worst condition you can imagine. Her face looked like someone put battery acid all on her face,” Marez told reporters.
“It was a what the f—k moment,” Zachary said.
“They tried to convince us not to see her,” Marez added. “But we weren’t going anywhere. We’d been searching for her for months.”
The family claims that, in addition to failing to notify the family of her passing, the hospital didn’t bother to issue a death certificate. What’s more, her body had been “harvested” for organs, even though she had never agreed to be a donor.
Walker’s family eventually discovered she died way back on Nov. 2 of cardiac arrest at Mercy General Hospital after being admitted two days earlier, on Halloween, for hypotension, hypothermia, and other symptoms. Surprisingly, the hospital had an address on file for her, which was a home in Sacramento that she sometimes shared with her adult son — yet no one was alerted, stated SF Gate.
The California-based medical nonprofit is now facing a civil lawsuit filed by Walker’s family, who allege gross negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It is one of dozens of lawsuits against Dignity Health over the mishandling of bodies. Walker’s lawsuit also names the mortuary owner, Michael Lofton, claiming he was responsible for “gross negligence” for failing to store her remains properly.
Earlier in 2023, the case of Jessie Peterson followed a similar pattern, according to a civil lawsuit. Peterson was admitted to a nearby Sacramento hospital owned by Dignity Health for a diabetic episode, and her decomposed remains were finally found months later in the same warehouse, Cremations Only. Her suit alleges that dozens of other patients’ unidentified bodies were held for months or even years at this off-site facility.
Even before Walker’s tragedy, Dignity Health was under intense scrutiny for losing bodies. The California Department of Public Health audited the multi-billion-dollar behemoth in 2022 and 2023.
However, the then-president claimed they “assumed the remains being stored did not have families,” according to SF Gate. That assumption certainly led to heartache for Walker’s family, who searched high and low for months.
“This final image of Ms. Walker is now ingrained in Kalia and Dalee’s minds as the last image of their beloved sister,” the suit states per SF Gate. “It will haunt them forever.”
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