Los Angeles County supervisors have agreed to pay $3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the children of Edith Rodriguez, the woman who died after writhing in pain for 45 minutes on the waiting-room floor of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital.
Rodriguez's death nearly two years ago attracted national attention, becoming a symbol of an indifferent emergency system. Her lack of treatment was a key event precipitating the closure of the long-troubled Willowbrook hospital after federal regulators determined that staffers had failed to deliver a minimum standard of care.
"There was a complete breakdown of common humanity in that waiting room," Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said Thursday. "That should never happen again. Now there is a $3-million exclamation mark on that point."
Coming after decades of problems at the King facility south of Watts, Rodriguez's death in the early morning of May 9, 2007, hit home in large part because the circumstances surrounding it were well-documented.
Rodriguez, 43, had been released from the King-Harbor emergency room just hours before her final visit -- at least her third in as many days to seek help for abdominal pain.
When she returned, a triage nurse dismissed her complaints. A security videotape showed a janitor mopping around Rodriguez and other staff walking past. Authorities also released two 911 calls of people pleading for help for Rodriguez as she lay in pain on the waiting-room floor.
In the first call, a dispatcher said help could not be sent because Rodriguez was already at a hospital. In the second, a dispatcher curtly told the female caller that it was not a "life-threatening emergency" and offered to give her the number for the business line.
County police officers ultimately arrested Rodriguez on an outstanding warrant, deciding she would get better medical treatment in jail than at the hospital. While in custody, she became nonresponsive and died.
Prosecutors later decided not to criminally charge the officers in her death, finding that they had acted with compassion and had been rebuffed by the nursing staff when they tried to get Rodriguez help.
Prosecutors also declined to file charges against Linda Ruttlen, whom they identified as the nurse on duty. They said that although she threatened to throw out a patient who complained about Rodriguez not getting care and then tried to encourage her colleagues to lie about the events that led up to the death, it was doubtful her actions were "a substantial factor" in Rodriguez's death from a perforated bowel.
