CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A wrongful death lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court in West Virginia’s Northern District is the first of what are expected to be multiple lawsuits connected to the suspicious deaths of veterans at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg.
The filing comes from Melanie Proctor on behalf of her late father, Ret. U.S. Army Sgt. Felix Kirk McDermott, 82, of Ellenboro, whose death was ruled a homicide months after he died in Apr. 9, 2018 from was later determined through an autopsy to be acute severe hypoglycemia.
Those named in the lawsuit include Robert Wilkie, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; Dr. Glenn Snider, medical director at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center and a list of other specified staff members.
“The government is responsible for its employees and for the negligence of its employees,” said Tony O’Dell, Proctor’s attorney, during an appearance on Tuesday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
McDermott’s death was one of at least ten veteran deaths under similar suspect circumstances on Floor 3A at the Clarksburg VA and O’Dell has been representing other surviving family members as well.
Most of the deaths were in 2018, but the lawsuit indicated the first case dated back to July 20, 2017. They continued until June 18, 2018, according to the filing.
O’Dell said, in the timeline for the deaths, McDermott’s death was No. 7 of the known victims.
His family was the first to talk publicly about what happened to him.
In part, the lawsuit filed Monday alleged the following:
“As a direct and proximate result of Defendant’s negligence, carelessness, recklessness, incompetent management and supervision, willful lack of care, deviations from the applicable standard of medical care and violations of non-discretionary duties, protocols, directives and rules, Ret. Army Sgt. McDermott suffered pain, fear, mental anguish, anxiety and then death.”
Included in the list of named VA employees were five nurses and others who “participated in causing or failing to prevent the acute severe hypoglycemia event,” the lawsuit alleged.
The “person of interest” in the deaths, who had reportedly worked on Floor 3A since 2015 or perhaps earlier, was not named in the filing.
O’Dell said that was because criminal investigations were still ongoing.
Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported a federal grand jury was meeting to hear testimony in connection with the deaths.
“We have a pattern of system failures that went on for a substantial period of time and, time after time, these veterans were dying and the lawsuit’s showing it’s not just this person who’s doing it, it’s the system failures and the VA and this particular VA,” O’Dell said Tuesday.
“The point of the lawsuit is to show that it’s not just this person, this person of interest in a vacuum, this was allowed to happen because of just incompetence and lack of caring at this facility.”
Tony O’dell talks with @HoppyKercheval about the first wrongful death lawsuit filed on behalf of the first known victim of suspicious deaths at the VA in Clarksburg Army Sgt. Felix McDermott. WATCH: https://t.co/wkudfIRZCB pic.twitter.com/NTkcq6Qhwr
— MetroNews (@WVMetroNews) March 3, 2020
In part, the lawsuit alleged the Clarksburg VA had a history of not properly reporting sentinel events, defined as “an unexpected occurrence involving death or serious physiological or psychological injury or the risk thereof.”
“They didn’t indicate a single one of these cases was a sentinel event, so there was no root cause analysis to prevent the next one which is what a root cause investigation is supposed to do,” he said.
“We should have never gotten to 2018 when a lot of these deaths occurred.”
Proctor previously filed an administrative claim with the VA that had not been addressed prior to the filing of the lawsuit.
Court documents indicated McDermott was admitted to the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center on Apr. 6, 2018 for pneumonia. By Apr. 8, he was showing improvement. Prior to a shift change that night at 8:30 p.m., McDermott was resting “with no signs of acute distress.”
By 2 a.m. on Apr. 9, he was in distress and his blood glucose was at 12 with no medical explanation after normal glucose tests of around 113 on Apr. 7 and Apr. 8.
McDermott died at 9 a.m. on Apr. 9.
At that time, McDermott’s cause of death was determined to be aspiration pneumonia with sepsis with no referral for autopsy. The source of the sudden hypoglycemia was not investigated as it should have been, the lawsuit alleged.
McDermott’s body was later exhumed for the autopsy that determined he died by homicide.
Prior to Apr. 9, 2018, the lawsuit alleged there was “a clear pattern” of sudden severe and unexplainable hypoglycemia developed during nighttime hours on Floor 3A at the Louis A. Johnson Clarksburg VA Medical Center.
“The pattern we see with these patients was they were all making turns for the better,” O’Dell said.
“They’d been moved from the ICU to this Floor 3A. They were improving. They were not diabetics, most of them, so they would have a normal blood sugar.”