Times acquires tape excerpts showing King-Harbor staff ignoring dying patient

Edith Isabel Rodriguez writhed for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital as staffers walked past and a janitor mopped around her. Her boyfriend called 911 from a pay phone outside the hospital, pleading futilely for help.

The infamous incident in May 2007 was captured by a security camera, but the tape was actually seen by very few people. Los Angeles County has insisted for more than a year that the tape is "confidential, official information," refusing to release it to Rodriguez's family or to The Times.

This week, however, excerpts of the grainy video were sent anonymously to the newspaper and are available on The Times' website.

The public airing of the tape comes the same week as an eerily similar -- but much clearer -- surveillance tape was released showing a woman collapsing and writhing on the floor of a Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital's waiting room last month. She lay there more than an hour, as patients and security guards looked on.

According to published reports, Esmin Green had been waiting in the psychiatric emergency room of Kings County Hospital for nearly 24 hours when she fell from her seat June 19. An hour and three minutes later, a staffer who had been alerted by someone in the waiting room went up to Green, tapped her with her foot and tried to awaken her.

Both incidents, on opposite coasts, brought dismay from patients and their advocates.

"Many times, people . . . think, 'If I keel over, I'm in a hospital, people will take care of me,' " said Michael Shapiro, an expert in bioethics at the USC Gould School of Law.

But that's not necessarily true, Shapiro said. He believes such incidents happen "more often than people think."

"I think it reflects deficiencies in the human character," he said, pointing to historical examples in which bystanders stood by as tragedies unfolded.

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., which runs Kings County Hospital, said in a statement Tuesday that the employees involved had been suspended or fired.

"We are shocked and distressed by this situation. It is clear that some of our employees failed to act based on our compassionate standards of care," Alan D. Aviles, president of the public hospital agency, said in the statement.