Personal Injury Lawyers in New York

Yesterday, March 25, 2008, a second crane collapsed, this one in Miami, FL. It was attached to a high-rise condominium building under construction. Its main section remained intact but a 20-foot section fell, which workers were trying to raise and attach to the top of the crane. It fell 30 floors and through the roof of a nearby two-story house which workers were using for storage.

Two construction crew workers were killed, one who had been in that storage house, and the other later in hospital. Five more workers were injured, one critically. The company which was managing the construction, Bovis Lend Lease Holdings Inc., had worked well with OSHA (Office of Safety and health Administration) before and was regarded as typically going “above and beyond” regarding safety and health. The crane workers were part of a sub-contractor, and that company is cooperating with investigators. OSHA has two investigators onsite.

In New York, contractors are not permitted to raise or lower large cranes on construction sites without a buildings inspector being present. However, in Florida, the state does not license or regulate crane operators. Bills which would change that are at present in both houses of the legislature.

We will be glad to give you a free consultation if you or a loved one have been injured on a construction site. We take both Workers’ Compensation and Premises Liability cases, as well as Wrongful Death and Severe Personal Injury. Please send us an email, or give us a call if you would like to learn more about your legal options and rights.

On March 20, a New York City inspector was arraigned in connection with the March 15 collapse of the 20-story crane (see last Wednesday’s blog in this space). He was charged with falsifying business records and “offering a false instrument for filing”. His name is Edward Marquette and he worked as an inspector in the NY Department of Buildings division of cranes and derricks.

What this amounts to is that he is charged with lying about whether or not he had inspected this crane. The crane was attached to a Manhattan building under construction by two six-ton steel collars. The top one came loose and fell on to the lower one, detaching it from the building. With no support, the crane collapsed and killed 7 people, mostly workers on that construction site.

City records show that several local residents had called in complaints about the crane’s questionable safety. Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster said that complaints were received on January 10 and February 11, and one on March 4 to the city’s 311 hot line. Marquette told them he inspected it but they later determined that he had not.

However, Lancaster also said that even if he had inspected the crane on March 4, it would probably not prevented the crane’s collapse, because the two steel collars were not at the construction site on that day.

Residents were upset with the construction site because of its early-morning noise, besides the crane’s doubtful safety. The jackhammers and drills had been starting at 7 a.m. and neighbors were wondering how the work crew had received permission to start work so early.

If you have been injured by something unsafe at a construction site, please give us a call, or send an email. We’d be glad to give you a complimentary consultation. We have over twenty years of experience in representing construction site workers, and as much experience representing members of the public who have been hurt by a negligent premises owner.

On Saturday, March 15, a large crane collapsed in the area of 50^th and 51^st Streets near Second Avenue in New York. Seven bodies have now been pulled from the site, so that all who were thought to be affected by the collapse are now accounted for. Most were construction workers. There were also 24 other people injured, three of them severely.

The crane’s fall damaged six buildings and about 12 nearby buildings were evacuated. The day before, Friday, city officials had inspected the crane and found no violations. The construction site had previously been cited for 13 minor infractions unrelated to the crane and its fall. One was failing to perform adequate housekeeping and another was failing to have a safety manager present. When asked about these, Mayor Bloomberg had replied, “Every large construction site has violations.”

In response to that, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said that it should not be regarded as “business as usual” for construction sites to have violations.

It seems that what caused so much destruction was a piece of steel falling and cutting a tie which held the crane to a skyscraper under construction. We will probably see more news reports following up on this event.

If you have been injured on a construction site, or if you have lost a loved one in a construction accident, please call or email us to arrange for a free consultation.

In 1984, one Dr. Jaycant Patel was found guilty of gross negligence and incompetence by New York regulators. He had failed to examine patients before their surgery and was fined and placed on clinical probation. In 1989, he moved to Oregon, where he worked for Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Portland. Complaints began at once, that he performed surgery when it was not needed, and on patients who were not his responsibility. In some cases the surgeries led to severe injury or patient death.

In 1998 Kaiser put limitations on his licence, requiring that he seek second opinions before performing any surgery, and banning him from performing liver or pancreatic surgeries. The limitations were made statewide in 2000, and in 2001 New York State health officials had him surrender his license.

A distant sanctuary?

So Dr. Patel took action which 100 years ago might have been effective: he went to Australia to disappear. By falsifying application forms he managed to be appointed the Director of Surgery at Bundaberg Base Hospital in Queensland, Australia in April, 2003. The Queensland health authorities did not check his background. They hired him for the “area of need” program which hires foreign-trained doctors for under-serviced areas. Bundaberg is a pretty town 385 kilometers north of Brisbane, on the Burnett River, just south of the Great Barrier Reef. It has a large sugar cane industry and manufactures rum.

Again, complaints began at once, his surgeries being described as “sloppy” and “antiquated”. They called him Dr. E. coli. Nurses had noticed that he didn’t wash his hands, and some hid their patients when he was in the hospital. Between 2003 and 2005 Patel was linked to over 87 deaths. Thirty of those died under his care in Bundaberg.

Patel arrested

After some Queensland politicians raised these issues, the media uncovered Patel’s past, giving him the name Dr. Death. He quickly left Australia, returning to Portland Oregon. On March 13, 2008, FBI agents arrested him there. The subsequent hearing revealed that he is facing numerous charges and three life terms in prison, plus over 100 years more. Now there is a warrant for his extradition to Australia for trial.

The question of extradition

A Texas doctor in support of Dr. Patel has urged him to fight the extradition, and stated that the responsible party is the Queensland medical authorities who should have provided more supervision. He claims that Patel would not get a fair trial in Australia because of the media coverage. There is a case concerning a possible extradition to Greece of another defendant, and lawyers say it might provide a test as to whether Patel can be extradited to Australia. In the other case the defendant is claiming he would not get a fair trial in Greece because of media coverage.

If you have been injured by a medical professional, or if you have lost a loved one because of medical malpractice, please call or email us for a free case evaluation.

Our soldiers put their lives and health in danger voluntarily to protect the nation, and although both the military and the federal government have some programs in place to provide healthcare to injured soldiers, it is not always enough.

In West Virginia, a bill has been sponsored that would create a state Traumatic Brain Injury Services Commission. Its job would be to identify soldiers diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and find healthcare for them, or other services they might need.

TBIs can be utterly life-destroying. Depending on which part of the brain is injured, a person can be:

• Partially or totally paralyzed
• Unable to speak
• Unable to see or hear well, or at all
• Unable to learn, or to remember what was previously learned

The brain is still a medical mystery to some extent, and each brain injury is an individual thing. Severe TBIs can leave a person in need of permanent living assistance, in chronic pain, and unable to earn a living.

The West Virginia bill would apportion one percent of the state’s video lottery revenues to this new TBI resource. It is not known how many West Virginia soldiers have brain injuries, but nationally it is estimated that over 7,000 Americans are admitted to hospitals (military and veterans) each year for TBI.

It is not only soldiers in the line of fire who are at risk for TBI. Any civilian can sustain a TBI in a motorcycle accident, sports accident, construction site accident, or in many other ways. If you have a loved one with a TBI and are wondering how to meet all the medical and other costs, perhaps you have a valid legal claim. Depending on how the injury happened, there could be a negligent party who could be held responsible. For a free consultation, please call us or send an email.

The family of an infant boy whose penis was severed during a circumcision filed a lawsuit in July 2007 claiming a doctor and the hospital were negligent. The Chicago lawsuit alleges that due to negligence, Dr. Sherif Malek severed the entire glans, commonly called the "head" of the penis during a routine circumcision the day after his birth on February 14, 2007.

At the completion of the procedure, hospital records indicated that significant bleeding occurred, and upon inspection, nearly all of the glans had been amputated at the time of the circumcision. Three months later, the little boy required penile skin transfer surgery and will need future procedures, some of which are only appropriate at the time of puberty.

According to an expert witness from Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the clamp used in the procedure cannot amputate a male infant's glans when it is used properly and the injury to the infant was completely preventable.

Medical malpractice caps in Illinois will prevent the boy from recovering more than $500,000 against the physician, and the hospital's liability is capped at $1 million.

In November, 2007, Bayer AG, the German company long famous for its aspirin and more recently the manufacturer of Trasylol, pulled Trasylol off the worldwide market. This was in response to a request from the FDA which asked Bayer to remove Trasylol from the American market for safety reasons. The FDA had previously approved Trasylol in 1993.

Trasylol is a blood-clotting drug used to control bleeding during surgery. It has often been used in coronary artery bypass graft surgeries, but has been associated with increased chances of kidney damage and death.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association back in January 2006 found that patients taking Trasylol had a greater risk of death during the following five years than patients who took alternative drugs. One of the authors of this study, Dr. Dennis T. Mangano, has recently estimated that perhaps 1,000 people per month have died because of Trasylol use between January 2006 and November 2007, when Bayer AG began pulling it off the market. He made that statement on a 60 Minutes program on February 17, 2008.

Trasylol’s withdrawal from the market has been done gradually, to make sure that alternative drugs would be available. There are two alternatives, known as aminocaproic acid and tranexamic acid, both of which are effective, according to two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine on February 21, 2008. They are also less expensive and less risky than Trasylol.

If you have a loved one who sustained kidney damage after Trasylol was used in surgery, or who has since died, please contact us for a free case evaluation.

Roy Hodgson, aged 66, was a cancer patient in Britain who had been through the procedure to remove a tumor from his throat. He was recovering in hospital with a feeding tube inserted, since he was unable to swallow until the throat area had healed up.

His prognosis was good until the feeding tube came out and a nurse re-inserted it incorrectly. Nobody noticed for two weeks, not even the radiologist who studied a scan of the area. When Mr. Hodgson’s family visited him, he tried to tell them he was hungry, and pointed to his swollen abdomen. Nobody could understand what he was trying to say. No hospital personnel noticed that his feeding tube was in the wrong place and the food was not going into his stomach.

It had been inserted into the abdominal cavity instead of into the stomach. He developed peritonitis, which is a difficult condition to treat under the best circumstances. It is an infection of the membrane which lines the abdominal cavity. His abdomen was swollen from the infection. Still nobody noticed.

Finally he was found crouching in the hospital foyer, clutching his stomach, and trying to escape from the hospital. He was quickly taken to intensive care, where he died of hunger and infection.

The hospital has accepted responsibility for this medical negligence and will be paying damages to Mr. Hodgson’s family. The hospital is a National Health Service hospital, part of Britain’s socialized medicine system, paid for by taxes. The entire system immediately changed its protocol for feeding tubes, and Mark Hodgson, Hodgson’s son, aged 28, feels that this is enough. The family is not pursuing legal action for the money, as Mark explained:

““We have been told that they have changed the procedure nationwide. That is the best thing we could have got from this.”

At the inquest following Mr. Hodgson’s death, the Coroner concluded that Mr. Hodgson had died as a result of an accident.

If you have lost a loved one because of a hospital mistake, please contact us for a free case evaluation. We believe that medical negligence should be exposed and those responsible should be held liable for the pain and injury they cause.