If medical workers at the federal prison in Forrest City had simply offered basic medical care when an inmate hurt his ankle in 2004, it could have saved him years of pain and the government an $813,000 malpractice judgment, a Little Rock attorney said Wednesday.
“It wouldn’t have been complicated if they had just taken some steps to resolve it,” attorney Milton DeJesus said about an ankle injury that health-care workers ignored for a month, eventually leading to five years of litigation that ended Oct. 15 in a victory for the former inmate.
DeJesus’ client, Jose Luis Gonzalez, now 54, was in his fifth month of serving a drugtrafficking sentence at the medium-security prison when, on July 28, 2004, during a softball game on prison grounds, another player slid into him as he covered second base, causing serious injury to his left ankle and lower left leg.
Gonzalez sought treatment for his injuries the next morning, but G. Toliver, a registered nurse at the prison, turned him away, telling him to return the next morning during “sick-call hours,” according to court documents.
When Gonzalez returned as instructed, making clear he had an “emergency” and a possible fracture, Toliver told him he couldn’t be treated until the next week and that he must make an appointment, according to U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright’s 22-page order.
When Gonzalez protested, Toliver simply called out, “Next,” the order said, citing testimony taken during a nonjury trial in Wright’s Little Rock courtroom in late August.
The order shows that Gonzalez returned to the clinic on Aug. 6, where a Spanish-speaking physician’s assistant, Yvette Toro, assessed his pain level at “6” on a scale of 1 to 10.
Toro requested X-rays, but said later that it wasn’t because she suspected a fracture, but because she feared a skin infection had worsened.
However, despite those claims of Toro and her supervisor, Clinical Director Edna Prince, concerns about the infection weren’t mentioned in a written radiology request, Wright noted.
Reports show that Prince,a physician, also saw Gonzalez that day, although she later claimed it was only for a diabetes checkup. Prince denied at trial that she wouldn’t allow Toro to serve as an interpreter during the visit.
“Certainly, Dr. Prince did not always utilize the services of an interpreter in her gathering of information to determine what the patient was trying to tell her,” Wright noted.
The judge cited records showing that in response to several requests for assistance from Gonzalez, who wrote them in Spanish, Prince simply made a notation, “Cannot read Spanish,” or, “In English, please.”
The order shows that when DeJesus asked Prince at trial whether she had made any efforts to have Gonzalez’s requests translated, she replied, “I asked him to get it interpreted for me. That, I think, is part of his responsibility for communicating with medicalstaff.”
Prince maintained at trial that she didn’t think Gonzalez was in pain. Wright noted that he wasn’t provided with a wheelchair or crutches, nor was he provided pain medication other than Motrin or ibuprofen that Toro had earlier prescribed for him.
Gonzalez was finally called in for an X-ray on Aug. 17 that had been ordered two weeks earlier. But, to make matters worse, the technician got him mixed up with another inmate and X-rayed his chest instead, the order notes. When the technician realized the error, he told Gonzalez he would have to reschedule his leg Xray for another day.
An X-ray finally taken on Aug. 26 showed fractures of Gonzalez’s fibula and ankle, and prompted health-care workers to place him in a wheelchair and transport him to St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, where surgery performed the next day required the placement of two screws in his ankle.
Wright awarded the former inmate - who couldn’t attend his own trial because he had been deported - $10,000 a day for pain and suffering, and mental anguish, for the 28 days until he received treatment. She also awarded him $528,000 for the permanent injury he will suffer for the rest of his life, which she estimated at another 22 years, for a total of $813,000 in compensatory damages.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 14 on 10/29/2010