‘Never should have happened’
Jury awards Stamford man’s family $5.5M for fatal medical malpractice
STAMFORD — A jury awarded $5.5 million to the family of a Stamford man who, they determined, died after doctors failed to properly diagnose and treat him in September 2018.
The lawsuit states 69year-old Felix Mejia went to the Stamford Hospital emergency room on Sept. 18, 2018, complaining of diarrhea and abdominal cramping that he had been experiencing over the course of three weeks.
Hospital staff ran some tests on Mejia at the time and discharged him after diagnosing him with “traveler’s diarrhea,” the complaint said.
Mejia returned to the hospital two more times over the next six days as his symptoms progressively worsened, according to the complaint.
During his last trip to the hospital on Sept. 27, 2018, Mejia was finally scheduled for surgery to repair damage caused by “severe chronic mesenteric ischemiam” — a blocked artery in his intestines. However, that night Mejia suffered cardiac arrest and died during emergency exploratory surgery, the complaint said.
The lawsuit, which went to a jury trial in March, claimed that hospital staffers — namely Dr. Ryosuke Ito, physician’s assistant Vanie Mangal and their employer, Emergency Medicine Physicians of New Haven County LLC, which operates out of Stamford Hospital — “failed to properly examine, test, monitor, diagnose and render appropriate treatment” to Mejia, ultimately leading to his death.
“We are extremely happy for our clients and that their belief that Mr. Mejia should not have been sent home and should not have passed away as a result of being sent home has been unanimously validated by the jury,” said attorney Michael Kennedy, who represented Mejia’s wife, Angela Cadavid, and the Mejia estate during the three-week trial.
Attorney Frederick Trotta, who represented Emergency Medicine Physicians of New Haven County and their clients, declined to comment Thursday on the verdict.
Emergency Medicine Physicians of New Haven County did not respond to a request for comment.
Mejia moved to the United States from Medellin, Colombia, in the 1980s “in search of a better life,” Kennedy said.
“They made a family
and built a home here in Stamford and remained here,” Kennedy said. “Over the last several years, Mr. Mejia had actually retired and had been working on a farm in Colombia, where he hoped to spend most of his retirement.”
In the wake of last week’s decision, Mejia’s son Ronald rejoiced in what he said was validation for his family’s yearslong crusade for justice.
“We are very happy with the verdict as the jury’s decision validates what we believe never should have happened to our husband and father six years ago, and which we have worked to prove over the last four years of litigation,” Ronald Mejia said. “We hope that by bringing my dad’s case to light and pursuing it to the end, it will ensure that others who present to the Stamford Hospital emergency room are provided with better and more timely care.”
Kennedy said he had to prove during trial that Ito, Mangal and Emergency Medicine Physicians of New Haven County “were required by the standard of care to admit Mr. Mejia to the hospital on Sept. 22, 2018, or at least obtain a vascular surgery consultation in the emergency room to evaluate his condition, rather than send him home.”
Mejia’s estate also had to prove that “by negligently sending Mr. Mejia home, it caused his condition to deteriorate and ultimately led to his passing five days later,” Kennedy said.
“The jury’s verdict made clear that they believed we had proven exactly that,” Kennedy added.
The decision comes after Trotta and his clients rejected an offer to settle the malpractice case for $3 million, according to Kennedy.