By Lucas Sullivan
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Columbus has agreed to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit for $1.2 million after two fire division paramedics failed to properly treat a woman in cardiac arrest, including spending time discussing the pot roast they had left cooking back at the firehouse.
The settlement is among the largest payouts in city history and comes after a nearly four-year court battle over the death of Sonia Bray.
Bray, the mother of a Columbus police officer, was 76 when she died in February of 2012.
A few days before her death, Columbus paramedics James Amick and James Hingst were dispatched to an MRI center on Bethel Road for a report of a woman in cardiac arrest.
Bray was getting an MRI on her hip when she vomited. She complained of breathing problems and chest pains and was blue in the face, medical personnel at the facility told the paramedics.
But the paramedics did not treat Bray for nearly 25 minutes, according to court records and witness statements. At one point, one of the paramedics suggested that Bray’s son take her to the hospital in his personal vehicle, according to court records.
The medics did not check her vital signs, connect her to an electrocardiogram machine or follow procedures for someone showing signs of cardiac arrest, Bray’s attorneys said.
At one point, the paramedics started discussing the pot roast being prepared at their fire station for dinner that night, according to court records and witnesses.
After 26 minutes with Bray, Hingst and Amick took her to the hospital. Inside the medic unit, Bray slumped over and became unconscious.
The men performed CPR on Bray and kept her alive until they got to the hospital. Bray survived for a few days but the lack of blood flow and oxygen to her brain during the cardiac arrest proved fatal, her attorneys said.
The city hired Amick, 66, in 1996. Hingst, 57, was hired in 1987.
Amick said during a court deposition that he was “confused” by the problems Bray was experiencing during their encounter.
“We were not getting sufficient information about the patient,” Amick said. “The patient had no history of congestive heart failure.”
Bray’s attorneys said the medical professionals at the MRI center were stunned by the lack of urgency exhibited by Hingst and Amick and wrote letters of complaint to the city.
“They should not have taken it so lightly,” said Gerry Leeseberg, one of Bray’s attorneys. “We were appalled by their lack of action.”
Fire Chief Kevin O’Connor said the division has since implemented better training programs for paramedics and uses more simulations to better educate them. He said the goal is to simulate situations multiple times before paramedics encounter them on the street.
“This incident, though, is very concerning to me,” O’Connor said. “What happened on this run is not even close to the standards we hold ourselves to and we feel awful about what happened.”
Michael Halloran, an assistant city attorney for Columbus, said he could not comment on the details of the settlement because it still was not formally approved.
The City Council will vote on the settlement in the next two to three weeks, Halloran said. The settlement is larger than a $1 million payout for the 2003 electrocution of a boy who touched an improperly grounded light post on the Town Street Bridge and $900,000 paid to a woman who was blinded in one eye when police fired a rubber bullet at her while she was trying to obey their orders during a campus-area riot in 2001. The city’s largest lawsuit payout was $10 million after a sewer backup damaged a South Side rendering plant in 2005.
“Any incident that results in a loss of life is unfortunate,” Robin Davis, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther’s spokeswoman, said of the Bray case. “The division of fire is committed to assessing ways to make sure this doesn’t occur again.”
Halloran refused to release the fire division’s internal investigation of Hingst and Amick’s actions, citing federal and state medical privacy laws.
Copyright 2016 The Columbus Dispatch