Couple files lawsuit against Boston hospital after discovering the body of their premature baby had probably been thrown in the trash with soiled linens

• Authorities believe a Boston hospital discarded a baby's body with soiled linens in 2020.
• Everleigh Victoria McCarthy's parents sued Brigham and Women's Hospital on Thursday.

A Boston couple are suing one of the city's most prestigious hospitals after their premature baby's body was lost and believed to have been thrown out in the garbage.

The local outlet WBTS reported Friday that Alana Ross and Daniel McCarthy, the baby's parents, filed a lawsuit Thursday over the August 2020 incident at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

"We don't want anybody else to go through this," Ross, 37, told The New York Times. "We want the hospital to be held accountable. We want them to fix this."

The couple's child, Everleigh Victoria McCarthy, was born July 25, 2020, and developed massive bleeding in her brain, the Times reported. She was born three months premature.

Less than two weeks later, on August 6, doctors told the couple that Everleigh wouldn't survive, and she was taken off a ventilator, the Times and WBTS reported.

Ross and McCarthy called a funeral home and began planning a memorial, but when the home tried to get Everleigh's body, the hospital said it couldn't find it, the Times reported.

The couple filed a police report on August 11, 2020, and an investigation found that Everleigh's body was most likely thrown out with dirty linens from the morgue four days earlier, WBTS reported.

The Boston police in the report said the baby's body "was probably mistaken as soiled linen," the Times reported.

Her body was taken to the morgue as the couple prepared the memorial. But according to WBTS, the lawsuit alleges that a hospital employee put her body on a table that was not designated "for the delivery of infant remains to the morgue."

Ross told the Times that hearing the news made it feel as if her daughter "died all over again."

Everleigh's body hasn't been found despite investigators tracing where the body could've ended up and searching through medical debris that was covered in blood and human waste, WBTS reported.

The Times reported that a nurse who took Everleigh's body to the morgue didn't call the hospital back for its own investigation and that the police also said the hospital didn't give them a "complete video" of what happened at the time her body was taken to the morgue or when it realized she was missing.

"Having accepted the fact that she was going to pass away was one thing," McCarthy, 38, told the Times. "I never thought that I would have to accept the fact that I would have to go to bed every night not knowing where she is."

The hospital didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, but Dr. Sunil Eappen, the chief medical officer at Brigham and Women's Hospital, told the Times the hospital offered its "deepest sympathies and most sincere apologies to the Ross and McCarthy family for their loss and the heartbreaking circumstances surrounding it."