Woman in coma gives birth to baby boy

[Stormy]

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/01/09/us/arizona-woman-vegetative-state-gives-birth/index.html

 

There’s a great scene from “Kill Bill” when the woman wakes up from a coma to learn that a male nurse or orderly has been pimping her out to horny males. She then goes on a killing spree

 

What kind of horrible person fucks a comatose person? This is just horrific

[samhexum]

What kind of horrible person fucks a comatose person? This is just horrific

Oh, please! SVU had this plot 16 years ago, and it wasn't one of their better episodes.

 

Waste

TV-14 | 1h | Crime, Drama, Mystery | Episode aired 15 November 2002

Season 4 | Episode 8

 

The team is on the case of a woman who's been in a coma for 14 months and is found to be 7 weeks pregnant. After going though many suspects, they focus on the patient's doctor and discover he is impregnating comatose female patients with a rich donor's sperm in order to get embryonic stem cells that are biologically compatible. The problem for the ADA is that laws are not on her side in prosecuting such crimes.

[+ sync]

Some people have to reach up to touch bottom.

[rvwnsd]

When I first heard of this horrible incident the following came to mind:

• Did the family not notice she was "showing?"
  
• Did the facility not notice she was "showing?"
  
• What sick individual sexually assaults someone who is in a vegetative state?
  
• Didn't the facility have security cameras that monitor the hallways and room entrances?
  

[+ quoththeraven]

When I first heard of this horrible incident the following came to mind:

• Did the family not notice she was "showing?"
  
• Did the facility not notice she was "showing?"
  
• What sick individual sexually assaults someone who is in a vegetative state?
  
• Didn't the facility have security cameras that monitor the hallways and room entrances?
  

She may not have family monitoring her condition, but it does make one wonder how her pregnancy wasn't noticed. Presumably she doesn't spend all her time completely clothed - how is she bathed, for example?

 

I'm not sure cameras would have helped, though. Most likely the perpetrator was someone who would be expected to enter her room. It would only be helpful retrospectively, and obtaining DNA from male employees, which is currently happening, is a more direct way of identifying the culprit.

[rvwnsd]

She may not have family monitoring her condition, but it does make one wonder how her pregnancy wasn't noticed. Presumably she doesn't spend all her time completely clothed - how is she bathed, for example?

 

I'm not sure cameras would have helped, though. Most likely the perpetrator was someone who would be expected to enter her room. It would only be helpful retrospectively, and obtaining DNA from male employees, which is currently happening, is a more direct way of identifying the culprit.

If they had cameras that were monitored someone would have noticed a person entering the room and being in there for an inordinately long time and investigated.

[+ sync]

Without knowing the history of the facility it's difficult to determine how many may be complicit and/or how many more have been intimidated into silence. It certainly is very ugly on the surface.

[+ Avalon]

This has been done on the "Law & Order" series shows.

[+ WilliamM]

This has been done on the "Law & Order" series shows.

 

Could you give more details, please.

 

I can not give you a like because of the subject, please understand.

[samhexum]

This has been done on the "Law & Order" series shows.

Could you give more details, please.

 

Umm...

 

Oh, please! SVU had this plot 16 years ago, and it wasn't one of their better episodes.

 

Waste

TV-14 | 1h | Crime, Drama, Mystery | Episode aired 15 November 2002

Season 4 | Episode 8

 

The team is on the case of a woman who's been in a coma for 14 months and is found to be 7 weeks pregnant. After going though many suspects, they focus on the patient's doctor and discover he is impregnating comatose female patients with a rich donor's sperm in order to get embryonic stem cells that are biologically compatible. The problem for the ADA is that laws are not on her side in prosecuting such crimes.

[marylander1940]

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/01/09/us/arizona-woman-vegetative-state-gives-birth/index.html

 

There’s a great scene from “Kill Bill” when the woman wakes up from a coma to learn that a male nurse or orderly has been pimping her out to horny males. She then goes on a killing spree

 

What kind of horrible person fucks a comatose person? This is just horrific

 

Same person that uses a roofie.

 

You read my mind about that scene from Kill Bill.

 

[+ sniper]

The article doesn't say they were surprised by the birth, i think they've known she was pregnant for some time, but can only get the DNA now that the baby has been born.

[MikeBiDude]

The article doesn't say they were surprised by the birth, i think they've known she was pregnant for some time, but can only get the DNA now that the baby has been born.

Sounds like they were surprised actually...they called 911:

“One of our patients just had a baby, and we had no idea she was pregnant,” the nurse said.

911 Article here

[samhexum]

This has been done on the "Law & Order" series shows.

Could you give more details, please.

 

ALSO: from the mother ship:

 

Grief

TV-14 | 46min | Episode aired 4 February 1998

Season 8 | Episode 14

 

McCoy pursues murder charges against a health care worker who impregnated a comatose patient after the woman dies during childbirth. However, investigation also reveals that the victim's mother may have played a role in the incident.

[samhexum]

What kind of horrible person fucks a comatose person? This is just horrific

Some people have to reach up to touch bottom.

Most likely the perpetrator was someone who would be expected to enter her room.

If they had cameras that were monitored someone would have noticed a person entering the room and being in there for an inordinately long time and investigated.

It certainly is very ugly on the surface.

 

 

Woman, 29, Still in 10-Year Coma, Is Pregnant by a Rapist

 

By FRANK BRUNI JAN. 25, 1996

 

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

 

She was an outstanding student, graduating near the top of her class at a respected Roman Catholic high school in the area and heading to an Ivy League university for a future in the sciences, or perhaps medicine.

 

But a sudden swerve off a road thrust her car into a tree and her into a coma that never lifted over the next decade. Fed by a tube, swaddled in a diaper, she aged from 19 to 29 with little change in her condition.

 

Then in late December, the staff attending her at a nursing home in Brighton, a suburb on this city's southeastern edge, noticed a puzzling difference: her belly was growing bigger.

 

The police said that doctors first checked for a digestive blockage, then did three separate tests before relaying their discovery to criminal authorities and the patient's stunned family on New Year's Eve. The woman was pregnant, the victim of a rape.

 

This extraordinary case, details of which have emerged gradually over recent weeks, has drawn scrutiny from state health and criminal justice officials for its vivid demonstration of the vulnerability of nursing-home patients to abuse.

 

But it is attracting the attention of physicians and ethicists for an additional reason: the young woman's parents, acting as her guardians, have chosen to continue her pregnancy. A full-term pregnancy would result in a birth in May.

 

John Parrinello, a lawyer in Rochester who is serving as the family's spokesman, said: "It was a very difficult decision, because nobody could predict the future, her capacity to survive a pregnancy, her capacity to deliver a child. There are not many cases similar to this."

 

Mr. Parrinello said it had not been determined who would raise the child.

 

Several prominent biomedical ethicists said that while they can cite cases of pregnant women who fell into comas or suffered brain death, they cannot recall any other case of a woman's becoming pregnant while already in one of those conditions.

 

They said this case raises troubling ethical concerns. "There's some question here about using her as a vessel," said Ellen Moskowitz, a health care lawyer and bioethicist at the Hastings Center in Briarcliff Manor. "Does that recognize her humanity? Is this something that offends the natural order?"

 

In addition, Ms. Moskowitz said, "You could wonder about the effects of a child born of this arrangement. What kind of explanation is due this child, and what are the potential harms that could flow from that?"

 

Law enforcement sources said the young woman's family was motivated by the belief that she would not have wanted an abortion and by the desire to see a part of her live on.

 

The family declined to be interviewed, and Mr. Parrinello has released little information about her. He has also asked that she be accorded the anonymity usually granted rape victims who request it.

 

The authorities investigating the case, who have not made an arrest, have withheld the young woman's name from the public record and similarly have released little information about her.

 

But Gary Ciulla, an investigator with the Brighton Police Department, said that to see the young woman, whose blue eyes often follow a visitor around the room, is to get a haunting sense of the promise her life once held.

 

"You could see the remnants of her beauty," Mr. Ciulla said. "She was a beautiful girl."

 

Mr. Ciulla and others who have visited her say she breathes without the assistance of machines, responds physically to certain stimuli and can feel pain, but is completely uncommunicative and seems unaware of her surroundings.

 

As a result of her family's silence, little is known about her prognosis when she first lapsed into a coma in 1985, the choices her family faced in keeping her alive or the precise reasons they decided not to end her pregnancy, which was between four and a half and five months along when it was detected.

 

Although the doctors attending the young woman's pregnancy at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, where she was moved after her condition was discovered, declined to be interviewed, other medical experts said that if the young woman's vital signs are normal, she may well be able to deliver a healthy baby.

 

The young woman and her family are Catholic, and one of her close friends from high school remembered her as deeply religious and opposed to abortion.

 

"She was always pretty pro-life," said the friend, Vicky Hansen, who now lives in Troy, N.Y. Ms. Hansen said that she recalled her stating that position in a class they took on contemporary issues.

 

Ms. Hansen, other classmates, family acquaintances and the woman's school records portray her as a straight-laced, sober-minded teen-ager from a middle-class family with some domestic troubles that led to her parents' divorce sometime after the car accident.

 

On her mother's side, she comes from a large Polish clan of colorful weddings and deep Catholic faith. The young woman herself was the oldest child and only girl in a family of four children. They lived on a suburban street in a modest two-story house that afforded a view of the steeple on the Catholic church a block away.

 

The young woman attended a Catholic grammar school and then a Catholic high school for girls, participating in diving, gymnastics, theater and a Christian service group during her first years. Later, Ms. Hansen said, the young woman scaled back on extracurricular activities so she could take a job as a cashier in a grocery store and save money for college.

 

But her attention to her studies never flagged. "There was a big deal about who was going to be valedictorian, and she was in the running," Ms. Hansen said. "It came down to the wire."

 

By different accounts, the young woman graduated second or third in a class of roughly 180 students. She was accepted to Cornell University in Ithaca, and was inducted into the National Honor Society before her high school graduation in June 1984.

 

Photographs of her from her yearbook show an extremely pretty girl with a radiant smile and a tiny metal crucifix dangling from a chain around her neck.

 

Classmates said they lost track of her when she went to Cornell. The car accident apparently occurred during the second semester of her freshman year, because school records show that she had ceased to attend classes by late March 1985.

 

Elaine McKay, a high school classmate, recalled that the young woman was driving with a college boyfriend and swerved off the road to avoid hitting a deer. Ms. McKay could not remember the boyfriend's name, what happened to him or where the accident occurred.

 

Ms. Hansen said the young woman had been dogged by ill fortune. Her boyfriend during her senior year of high school accidentally shot and killed himself, Ms. Hansen said. The incident drew widespread local publicity because the 17-year-old boy was apparently influenced by the Russian roulette sequence in the movie "The Deer Hunter."

 

Since her own accident, the young woman has been institutionalized, but she was not placed in the nursing home, the Westfall Health Care Center, until February of last year. The 145-bed nursing home had opened just two months earlier.

 

Surrounded by fields, decorated in blues and purples and immaculately clean during a visit on Tuesday, the nursing home appeared to be an ideal environment.

 

But unannounced visits from State Health Department inspectors last year found many deficiencies, including ants in the dining room and crusted food around patients' mouths, said Claudia Hutton, a department spokeswoman. More disturbingly, one of Westfall's former nurse's aides, John Horace, 51, has been charged with sexually abusing a 49-year-old female patient there in September. The comatose woman's rape is believed to have occurred in August.

 

Criminal authorities said there are differences between the cases; the 49-year-old patient, for example, is partly physically disabled and was not raped. The police would not say whether they have a suspect.

 

Claudia Blumenstock, the administrator of Westfall, said in a prepared statement that its staff is shocked by what happened. "Unfortunately," Ms. Blumenstock added, "nursing homes cannot provide full-time surveillance of our premises to prevent unforeseeable criminal acts."

 

The State Attorney General's office has joined the Brighton police in investigating the rape, because Westfall's acceptance of Medicaid patients gives Attorney General Dennis C. Vacco some jurisdiction.

 

Mr. Vacco said that what happened there should be be seen in the context of 1,000 complaints about abuse in nursing homes that his office receives every year. "It is indicative of a very significant problem that is largely unrecognized," Mr. Vacco said.

[samhexum]

The family of a developmentally disabled woman is suing a Pensacola adult care facility after the nonverbal, immobile woman was allegedly raped and impregnated early last year.

 

The 23-year-old woman suffers from "profound mental retardation" and has several developmental and intellectual disabilities to the point where she can't move her hands or fingers and has to be fed through a tube, according to a civil lawsuit filed Tuesday in Escambia County.

 

She was being cared for at Pensacola Cluster, a 24-bed intermediate care facility for children and adults with developmental disabilities.

 

The lawsuit notes that due to the woman's multiple disabilities, she "was and is totally and completely dependent upon and at the mercy of National Mentor staff." National Mentor is the company that operates Florida Mentor which, in turn, operates Pensacola Cluster.

 

A person who answered the phone at Pensacola Cluster on Wednesday afternoon said that the organization had no comment on the lawsuit.

 

 

The lawsuit alleges that in January 2018, the woman was attending Westgate School on weekdays, a school for children and young adults with intellectual and physical disabilities. Westgate employees observed behavioral changes in the woman and noticed bruising on her hip when changing her diaper, according to the complaint.

 

Westgate staff alerted the woman's caregivers at Pensacola Cluster several times throughout the month of January, but the caregivers declined to seek medical treatment for the woman, investigate the cause of the injuries or notify the Florida Adult Abuse Hotline, according to the complaint.

 

According to a separate Agency for Health Care Administration report that was not part of the initial complaint, the Westgate staffers alerted the Department of Children and Families to the suspected abuse.

 

 

In February, a doctor at the Pensacola Cluster facility ordered an X-ray of the woman's hip and determined it was broken, according to the lawsuit. The next day, she was transported to Baptist Hospital for hip surgery. During a routine pre-surgical pregnancy screening, doctors learned the woman was pregnant.

 

The AHCA investigation noted she was between two to three weeks pregnant at that point.

 

A sexual assault examination was performed the same day, and the exam "revealed significant bruising on her outer hip, left inner thigh, and left calf," as well as lacerations and bruising on her vagina and hymenal ring, the complaint stated. The woman later miscarried.

 

The complaint alleges that "due to her developmental disabilities, Plaintiff is unable to knowingly and voluntarily give consent to sexual intercourse and she has been declared legally incompetent."

 

Her lawyers are seeking damages for the medical costs associated with her assault and pregnancy, as well as for severe emotional distress, pain and suffering. The lawsuit does not specify a particular dollar amount that the family is seeking.

 

Jim Green, an attorney with the Clark Partington law firm in Pensacola who is representing the victim's mother, said in a statement that the family is seeking justice for the woman.

 

"(The victim's) mother is outraged and devastated by what happened to (her)," Green said in an email to the News Journal. "What she wants is to protect (her daughter) from abuse and for (her daughter) to be safe."

Maj. Andrew Hobbs with the Escambia County Sheriff's Office confirmed law enforcement investigated the incident, but said no perpetrator had been identified and the case had been closed.

 

"We exhausted all leads, we have no suspects, and the case will be placed inactive," he said. "However, if we get any more leads, the case can always be reopened."

 

Hobbs said he couldn't comment further on the investigation, including on whether or not DNA samples had been obtained and been matched with people who might have come into contact with the victim.

 

According to the AHCA report, officials investigated the incident and cited several "deficiencies" with the way Pensacola Cluster responded to the situation. The program manager at the facility was informed several times of the victim's bruising and behavioral changes prior to the discovery of the assault and broken hip, but said she didn't call the abuse hotline because she thought the wheelchair caused the bruises, the report states.

 

The program manager also said she didn't believe the victim had been raped, the AHCA report said.

 

When the sexual assault was discovered, the victim was immediately transferred to a different care facility.

 

The local case comes on the heels of another case in Phoenix, Arizona, involving an incapacitated woman who was impregnated while in an adult care facility.

 

The woman, who was left in a vegetative state after a near-drowning more than 10 years ago, became pregnant while she was a patient at Hacienda HealthCare in south Phoenix. She gave birth to a baby boy on Dec. 29.

 

Arizona officials are investigating the case, and Hacienda HealthCare's CEO resigned last week in the wake of the reports.

[samhexum]

A nurse at a healthcare facility in Arizona was arrested Wednesday for raping an incapacitated patient who gave birth last month, police said.

 

Nathan Sutherland, 36, a licensed practical nurse at the Hacienda HealthCare facility was arrested for sexual assault and vulnerable adult abuse after providing authorities with a DNA sample Tuesday under court order, said Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams.

 

 

The 29-year-old woman has been a patient at the facility since she was a toddler after a near-drowning.

 

Cops initially said she was in a coma, but a lawyer for her family said last week that she’s not. The lawyer says she has “significant intellectual disabilities” and can’t speak but has some ability to move her limbs, make facial gestures and respond to sounds.

 

She gave birth to a baby boy Dec. 29.

 

Sutherland had been one of the staff members responsible for her care at the time of the assault, the police chief said.

 

Employees at the long-term health facility said they had no clue the victim was pregnant and court records say her last physical was in April.

 

Sutherland was being booked into Maricopa County Jail Wednesday morning.

[rvwnsd]

The article doesn't say they were surprised by the birth, i think they've known she was pregnant for some time, but can only get the DNA now that the baby has been born.

The local media, including the public radio station, has consistently reported that they were surprised that she gave birth as they did not know she was pregnant.

[+ oldNbusted]

BBC News: Nurse arrested over US care home patient pregnancy

 

The suspect has been named as Nathan Sutherland, 36, who worked at the Hacienda Healthcare clinic.

 

The 29-year-old patient, who has reportedly been in the care of the clinic since she was a toddler, gave birth on 29 December.

 

Staff at the facility said at the time that they were unaware she was pregnant until she went into labour.

[rvwnsd]

The local media, including the public radio station, has consistently reported that they were surprised that she gave birth as they did not know she was pregnant.

 

A couple of days ago the Arizona Republic reported that the CEO resigned, one physician who was caring for the woman has resigned and another has been suspended. I already heard the story on public radio, as it has been all over the news here in Phoenix, and didn't even think to check the Republic (AZCentral is their website) for a link.

 

Without knowing the history of the facility it's difficult to determine how many may be complicit and/or how many more have been intimidated into silence. It certainly is very ugly on the surface.

Embedded in the linked story is a video that discusses the investigation of a sexual assault at the facility two years ago.