A California jury on Thursday awarded nearly $15 million to five people after eggs and embryos were destroyed when a fertility clinic’s cryogenic storage tank failed.

Three women and a couple filed the lawsuit over a tank failure that occurred in 2018 at San Francisco’s Pacific Fertility Center. Nearly 3,500 frozen eggs and embryos were destroyed as a result, The Associated Press reported.

The three women who lost eggs and the couple who lost embryos will collect the damages for pain, suffering and emotional distress, according to the news outlet.

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While their case is reportedly the first to go to trial, hundreds of other people have reportedly sued Pacific Fertility Center and Chart Industries Inc., which distributed the cryogenic tank that failed to properly house the eggs and embryos. During the trial, the women and couple described the loss the tank failure caused.

“It’s really painful to be at a baby shower celebrating someone else’s family being built and knowing inside you’ll never get that,” Chloe Poynton testified during the trial, according to the AP. “So you start to pull back. You start to isolate.”

During the closing arguments in the trial, a lawyer representing Chart Industries placed blame on the fertility center, claiming that the tank was misused. Jurors rejected that argument, finding that a manufacturing defect was the blame for the failure and was a “substantial factor” in the harm caused, the AP reported.

Pacific Fertility Center was found by jurors to be 10 percent responsible for harm and negligent, the outlet noted.

The couple was awarded $7.2 million in the case, and each of the three women took home between $2 and $3 million. 

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