Mom plans $25M lawsuit over son's staph death
The Cochran Firm, with office locations nationwide
BY KARLA SCHUSTER
karla.schuster@newsday.com
Newsday.com
9:56 PM EDT, October 30, 2007
As the mother of a boy who died from the so-called "superbug" announced plans Tuesday for a $25-million lawsuit against the city, health and education officials scrambled to reassure parents at a Bedford-Stuyvesant elementary school after a student there was diagnosed with the antibiotic-resistant infection.
"I want ... justice for my kid," Aileen Rivera said in a news conference at her attorney's lower Manhattan offices about the notice of claim filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court alleging negligence in the death of her only child, Omar, 12. "He was a healthy kid. I don't want somebody else to suffer like he did."
Rivera, who lives in Canarsie, is accusing Kings County Hospital of "negligence, recklessness and carelessness" because an emergency room doctor failed to diagnose her son with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA. Instead, the doctor gave Omar an over-the-counter antihistamine and sent him home. Two days later, on Oct. 14, Omar was dead.
"In the emergency room, they don't do nothing," Rivera said. "They gave him two Benadryl and they told me my son is OK."
The hospital has said that Omar did not exhibit symptoms of MRSA when his mother brought him to the emergency room. In a prepared statement, Kings County officials Tuesday declined to comment further, citing patient privacy and the pending legal action.
The notice of lawsuit came less than a day after parents at PS 3 in Bedford-Stuyvesant got a letter from the principal notifying them that a student there had contracted MRSA.
The letter said that the elementary school had been sanitized over the weekend, just as the school that Omar attended, IS 211 in Canarsie, had been a few days before that.
"The recent attention to MRSA has alarmed many NYC parents," the city Department of Health said in a prepared statement. "The alarm is understandable, and the threat of antibiotic-resistant diseases is real. But the focus on schools is misplaced."
Education and and health officials refused to comment on reports that students in at least two other city public schools had also been diagnosed with MRSA.
"We're not discussing individual cases," said Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education. "We're telling people it's important to wash your hands and not to share things like towels."
The school held a meeting Tuesday night to reassure parents and staff that the building is safe. Dozens of parents, with their children in tow, attended the meeting at PS 3. Many said they told school and health officials they were frustrated that the school has yet to determine the source of the infection. Other parents were skeptical of a letter sent home by principal Kristina Beecher stating she didn't know about the infection until after the maintenance staff disinfected the school.
"Let's be honest. There is no way to believe the maintenance knew before the principal," Toshia Moore, 36, a mother of a daughter, 8, said.
"I wish I had more information, I wish I felt safer," said one teacher, who declined to give her name but said that only 12 of her 20 students came to school Tuesday. "You ask yourself, 'Is soap and water the answer?' "
