Negligence

As Tim Harkrider extends his right hand, the ring commemorating a minor league baseball team's championship sparkles in the sunshine. He wears the ring proudly, despite its Angel logo. "I don't hate them," he said. He is, however, suing them. In a lawsuit filed in his home state of Texas, Harkrider, 28, charges the Angels with inferior medical care that prevented him from recovering from an ankle injury, regaining his status as a top prospect and, ultimately, playing in the major leagues.

Diane Rodrigues sang, prayed and bounced on her bed during the night at Metropolitan State Hospital. A nurse assigned to keep her under constant watch sat by, occasionally dozing. By 7 a.m., the 52-year-old psychiatric patient was lying motionless on the floor, her neck broken. It took at least an hour for caregivers at the Norwalk mental hospital to glean the extent of her injuries. It took four more hours to send her to a trauma center for treatment. Rodrigues, a former kindergarten teacher, was left paralyzed after the November 2009 accident and died six months later from related respiratory complications.

Firms that supply temporary nurses to the nation's hospitals are taking perilous shortcuts in their screening and supervision, sometimes putting seriously ill patients in the hands of incompetent or impaired caregivers. Emboldened by a chronic nursing shortage and scant regulation, the firms vie for their share of a free-wheeling, $4-billion industry. Some have become havens for nurses who hopscotch from place to place to avoid the consequences of their misconduct. An investigation by the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times found dozens of instances in which staffing agencies skimped on background checks or ignored warnings from hospitals about sub-par nurses on their payrolls.

The Los Angeles Unified School District was named in a negligence lawsuit filed this week on behalf of 20 former Miramonte Elementary School students who say they were victims of sexual abuse by a former teacher at the school. The lawsuit, which names several school board members as well as the current and former principal at Miramonte, claims that the district did not do enough to protect students who had lodged complaints about inappropriate conduct at the school. Mark Berndt, who in January was charged with 23 counts of committing lewd acts on children, was not named as a defendant in the suit.

A seriously ill patient died at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center after nurses failed to respond "for an extended period" to audio alarms signaling his distress -- the seventh death in two years in which staffers have virtually ignored vital sign monitors, Los Angeles County health officials said Tuesday. The incident, which took place in March, was one of four reported to the county Board of Supervisors in the last week in which patients allegedly received questionable care.

A 43-year-old woman who writhed in pain for 45 minutes on the emergency room lobby floor of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital died of a perforated bowel, the Los Angeles County coroner's office said late Friday. Neither hospital staff nor other patients attempted to assist her as she lay dying.

The Medical Board of California has accused a Beverly Hills fertility doctor of a pattern of gross negligence that led to the birth of Nadya Suleman's 14 children, including the world's longest-surviving octuplets, and created a "stockpile" of unused frozen embryos which serve "no clinical purpose." The 13-page accusation filed in December against Dr. Michael Kamrava paints a picture of 11 years of medical care in which Suleman returned to Kamrava's office again and again to undergo fertility treatments.

A married couple was sued Wednesday by their baby sitter, who claimed two men who sexually attacked her were able to get inside the house because a key was left in the back door. The Los Angeles Superior Court suit accuses Luther and Terri Henderson of negligence in the alleged April 24 attack upon the sitter inside the couple's home on Norton Avenue. The suit seeks unspecified general damages, medical expenses, lost earnings and punitive damages.

A South Los Angeles doctor will not face a California Medical Board disciplinary hearing scheduled for today, as a result of a preliminary injunction issued by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge. Leo Kenneally faced allegations of negligence and incompetence and possible revocation of his license after several complaints. He sued to prevent the hearing when the board would not allow him to take depositions from potential witnesses.

County officials investigating three major fires at Antelope Valley construction sites over the last month said Thursday that hurried, sometimes unsafe work practices caused by the area's housing boom have increased the risk of such fires. Investigations of the fires, the most recent of which destroyed 20 unfinished homes in Palmdale, injured four people and caused $1.5 million in damage Wednesday, are not yet complete.

While Jesse Bravo was being treated for schizophrenia at White Memorial Medical Center last year, his wife, Laura, called the hospital daily and visited him several times. But when hospital officials decided to discharge him, Laura Bravo said, they didn't notify her and instead left him outside a rehabilitation center in South Los Angeles. She said her husband, who is not homeless, never went inside and spent days on the streets before being found. "Not knowing where he was was very scary," she said.

The Medical Board of California has faulted a doctor in the 2010 death of a Lap-Band patient who had surgery at a clinic affiliated with the 1-800-GET-THIN ad campaign, filing charges that could cause him to lose his license to practice. The board has accused Dr. Daniel Shin, an anesthesiologist, of "gross negligence" in his care of patient Tamara Walter, who died Dec. 26, 2010, at age 52, three days after she had a Lap-Band implanted at a clinic in Beverly Hills. The medical board said Shin failed to adequately respond to Walter's worsening condition after surgery and left her with a nurse for more than an hour, despite signs that she was struggling.

Except for saying that it will appeal, American Honda Motor Co. has not talked about its loss in a high-profile Civic hybrid lawsuit this week over fuel economy claims. But Thursday evening, the automaker issued a statement on why it believes a Torrance Small Claims Court commissioner ruled in error when he awarded Civic owner Heather Peters $9,867.19 in damages. He ruled Wednesday that Honda negligently misled Peters when it claimed the hybrid could achieve as much as 50 miles per gallon.

The owner of a Honda Civic hybrid won an unusual Small Claims Court lawsuit Wednesday against the auto giant that some legal experts believe could change strategies for both Small Claims Court and class-action litigation. A Los Angeles County court commissioner ruled that American Honda Motor Co. negligently misled Civic owner Heather Peters when it claimed the hybrid could achieve as much as 50 miles per gallon. Court Commissioner Douglas Carnahan, who mailed his 26-page decision to Peters and Honda, awarded her $9,867.19 in damages.

Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich will not serve a jail sentence following his guilty plea in the killing of 24 Iraqis in 2005, a military judge said Tuesday. The announcement by Lt. Col. David Jones came after Wuterich took responsibility during his sentencing hearing at Camp Pendleton for the killings in the Euphrates River town of Haditha and expressed remorse to the victims' families. Jones said he had planned to recommend 90 days in the brig — the maximum as requested by the prosecution — but that the plea bargain approved by Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser had called for no jail time.

In the latest government effort to recoup mortgage meltdown losses, the federal regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sued 17 banks over mortgage bonds that were sold to the giant home-finance companies during the housing boom and proved to be toxic. The lawsuits, filed late Friday in New York federal and state courts and Connecticut federal court, for the most part accused the banks of negligence in misrepresenting the risks embedded in securities backed by subprime mortgages and other risky loans.

A North Hollywood nursing home's negligence led to the rape of a semi-paralyzed patient who became pregnant, a lawyer argued Monday in San Fernando Superior Court. Elian Rose, of North Hollywood, is seeking $20 million to $30 million from the Laurelwood Convalescent Hospital on behalf of her granddaughter, a long-term patient who suffered massive brain damage in a 1969 car accident. The woman became pregnant in 1982, had an abortion and was sterilized to prevent further pregnancies.

Defense attorneys for the former Bell leaders accused of looting the city's treasury said their clients scored a victory this week in a state Supreme Court ruling involving a Northern California official accused of misappropriating public funds. The high court, in rejecting an appeal from Sutter County Auditor-Controller Robert Stark, said that prosecutors in public corruption cases have to prove that defendants knew they were breaking the law, or were criminally negligent in not knowing.

A Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. lawsuit against former IndyMac Bancorp Chief Executive Michael W. Perry is the agency's second-largest attempt to recover money from bank officials whose approval of risky home loans during the housing boom allegedly caused the institutions to fail. The negligence suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Los Angeles, seeks $600 million, a fraction of the $13 billion the deposit-insurance fund lost because of IndyMac Bank's collapse in July 2008.