A fter months of digging up roadside ditches and crawling through drains to find their sister, Dalee Marez and Kalia Zachary were told that a body had been found in a morgue on the outskirts of Sacramento. There, they found Tonya. Her eyes were missing; so was her skin.

“They said she died of hypothermia,” Zachary said. “Then why did she look like she’d been eaten by wolves?”

The living nightmare of Tonya Walker’s disappearance and death is part of an alleged pattern of wrongdoing by a multibillion-dollar health care company that operates dozens of hospitals across California. Dignity Health has been accused of “callous, reckless, and outrageous failure” in multiple lawsuits that allege it lost patients’ bodies, failed to issue death certificates and neglected to tell family members that their loved ones were dead. Some of these cases led to families and law enforcement carrying out monthslong missing persons searches, all while the bodies were left to decompose at an off-site morgue, the lawsuits allege.

In two civil complaints recently filed in California, Dignity Health has been accused of gross negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. In response to the damning audits carried out by the California Department of Public Health in 2022 and 2023, seen by SFGATE, the president of the hospital, who retired this summer, told the Department of Health and Human Services, “We assumed the remains being stored did not have families.”