Maya Kowalski sobbed as a jury decided she had won her $220 million medical malpractice case Thursday.
A Florida jury found Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital liable for some wrongdoing in the case, which was featured in the Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya.”
Now 17, Kowalski gripped the bar and was moved when the stunning verdict was announced in a St. Louis courtroom. Stiff Petersburg.
Kowalski’s mother admitted the 10-year-old girl to the facility in 2015, telling doctors she had a chronic pain condition that required risky ketamine treatment.
Skeptical about Beata Kowalski’s claims — and the severity of Maya’s condition — staff contacted Florida child welfare authorities.
Maya was immediately removed from her parents’ care and admitted to the state’s voluntary medical ward.
After being barred from seeing Maya for 85 days and facing allegations of child abuse, Beata Kowalski took her own life in the garage of the family home.
Maya Kowalski sobbed when the verdict was read.Law&Crime Network
Arguing that the hospital wronged Maya and cruelly separated her from her mother, the Kowalski family sued the facility for $220 million.
Kowalski and her brother sobbed in the middle of the reading of the verdict, as the clerk referred to Beata Kowalski’s murder and the hospital’s complicity in her death.
Maya testified at trial she still suffers from the debilitating effects of complex regional pain syndrome, a neurological condition.
Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital was found guilty of all charges in the case. Google Maps
Rare diseases can cause severe and widespread pain due to dysfunction of the nervous system.
She told jurors that hospital staff ignored her condition and believed her mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, where caregivers make up or exaggerate a child’s illness for attention.
Lawyers for the hospital argued that staff took the drastic step because they felt Kowalski’s mother was harming her with ketamine treatment, which she had originally started in Mexico.
Maya’s mother, Beata Kowalski, committed suicide after being prevented from seeing her daughter. Courtesy of Netflix
“The reason why All Children’s did what it did, the reason All Children’s tried to comfort Maya, the reason All Children’s tried to get her on a safe medical path is because the caring and compassionate providers at my client’s hospital believed in a better future for her if they could get her out of unnecessary medications administered at dangerous levels,” hospital attorney Ethen Shapiro said in his closing statement Tuesday
In a draft of a 2015 blog post that Beata wrote in her daughter’s voice, she acknowledged the risk, writing how a ketamine coma previously induced in a Mexican clinic could potentially result in “total body failure/death.”
Still writing from Maya’s perspective, she writes elsewhere that “if I were a horse, I would be in a coma or dead” as a result of the severity of the treatment.
But Kowalski’s lawyers say hospital staff were guilty of callousness and overreaching in separating the young girl from her mother, an action that ultimately left her without one.
The Kowalski Family. Courtesy of Netflix
Kowalski broke down in tears repeatedly on stage as she recalled her mother’s care, telling jurors she felt lonely and abandoned while a ward of the state.
Defense attorneys sought to rebut Kowalski’s claims of ongoing illness.
His lawyer said he was unable to attend several court days due to pain, prompting the hospital’s lawyers to introduce a photo of him out of town just days later.
Kowalski’s family wept in court when the guilty verdict was handed down. Law&Crime Network
But Kowalski hit back, denying that he had only attended his graduation in one of the images and had been unfairly maligned.
The jury found in favor of the teenager overall, finding the famous hospital guilty of false imprisonment, malpractice and infliction of emotional distress.
The facility faces tens of millions of dollars in penalties, although it is expected to appeal the decision.
Lawyers for the hospital tore into the ruling, accusing the court of “plain error and prejudice.”
“The evidence clearly shows that Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital followed Florida’s mandatory reporting law in reporting suspected child abuse and, when the suspicion was confirmed by the district court, fully complied with Department of Children and Families (DCF) directives and the courts,” attorney Howard Hunter said in a statement.
“We are determined to uphold the important duty of mandatory journalists to report suspected child abuse and protect the smallest and most vulnerable among us.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
