Prosecutors filed civil complaints on Tuesday accusing two hospitals and a transportation services firm of dumping homeless patients in downtown Los Angeles, including one highly publicized case in which a paraplegic man wearing a colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter near a skid row park in February.
The complaints by the L.A. city attorney's office against Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Feliz and Methodist Hospital in Arcadia are related to four separate incidents of alleged patient dumping -- two by each hospital -- over a 14-month period.
Empire Enterprises, whose van driver allegedly left the 54-year-old paraplegic, Gabino Olvera, despite pleas from onlookers, has been named as a co-conspirator.
None of the patients, according to the city attorney's complaints, "arrived in skid row by accident or by informed choice." All four were sent downtown, the complaints allege, "without any plan for appropriate medical care and other necessary ancillary services" to allow the hospitals to rid themselves of the trouble and expense of caring for them.
City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo is trying to use a state law concerning unfair business practices, which has been used to prosecute alleged slumlords and which allows a corporation to be sued for unscrupulous behavior, to act against the hospitals. It is a tactic that Delgadillo's office first warned it might use in December 2005, when it sent a warning letter to several Southern California hospitals, including the two that were accused Tuesday.
The complaints seek fines against the hospitals and a judge's order to forbid the practice of dumping patients.
Jeffrey B. Isaacs, head of the criminal division in the city attorney's office and the lead lawyer on its anti-dumping initiative, charged that both hospitals "stonewalled, denied and finger pointed," and in some cases refused to provide investigators with information on their discharge policies and other individual hospital protocol.
Methodist Hospital issued a statement Tuesday that said officials "would like to have the opportunity to review [the complaint] before making any comments."
Sitrick and Co., the crisis management firm that is representing Hollywood Presbyterian, said in a statement that Olvera had been treated "appropriately at the hospital and received aftercare instructions, for which he signed...."
