Advocates: Autopsy Does Not Answer All the Questions Around Kings County Hospital Death

A medical examiner’s report put out late Friday evening on Esmin Green, the 49-year-old Brooklyn woman who died neglected last month on the floor of Kings County Hospital’s psychiatric emergency room, raises more questions than it answers, said advocates who filed a major civil rights lawsuit against the hospital last year.

“Needless to say, the family will be entitled to a truly independent autopsy that will take into consideration all of the factors related to her death, including that she appeared to have been heavily sedated and immobile for 24 hours,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Nothing in the autopsy undoes the fact that she was forced to wait in the emergency room for nearly a day without the medical care she so desperately needed; that she was ignored by multiple hospital employees as she lay dying on the ground for an hour; and that her medical records indicate she was ‘sitting quietly’ more than 10 minutes after her last desperate move on the floor.”

Green died in the early morning on June 19. Disturbing security videos show three employees ignoring the woman’s convulsing body, walking past her as she lay face down and dying for more than an hour. Further, hospital medical records misrepresent her condition in a way that suggests they have been altered or not maintained with the integrity the law requires.

The hospital is the subject of a lawsuit filed in May 2007 by the NYCLU, Mental Hygiene Legal Service, and Kirkland & Ellis LLP. The lawsuit describes the hospital’s psychiatric emergency room and inpatient unit as “a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger,” and seeks an end to abusive treatment in the hospital’s psychiatric facilities where patients are regularly ignored and those that dare advocate for themselves are punished with forcible injections of psychotropic drugs.