Video shows Hospital did nothing to help dying Mental Patient

Worse still, the surveillance tape suggests hospital staff may have falsified medical charts to cover the utter lack of treatment provided Esmin Green before she died.

"Thank God for the videotape because no one would have believed this could have happened," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

"There's a clear possibility of criminal wrongdoing with regard to recordkeeping, and that has to be investigated."

The city Department of Investigation is part of a sweeping probe that has brought some changes to the ward known as G Building.

A federal suit filed last year in Brooklyn alleged neglect and abuse of mental patients at the hospital. The suit sparked an investigation by the Brooklyn U.S. attorney's civil rights unit before the June 19 death.

Two different security guards spotted Green, a native of the island of Jamaica, prone on the floor and did nothing, the tape shows. They have been fired, along with four other staffers.

Green, 49, taken to the unit for "agitation," keels over out of her chair at 5:32a.m., according to the time stamp on the video. She had been sitting about 3feet from an observation window. Two other patients were in the room.

Green is lying facedown on the floor, her legs splayed, when a security guard strolls by at 5:53 a.m., looks at her for about 20 seconds and then walks away.

She is writhing on the floor, thrashing her legs, about 6 a.m., when her medical chart contends she was "awake, up and about, went to the bathroom."

Green rolls on her back at 6:04a.m. She stops moving at 6:08 a.m., but two minutes later a security guard pushed his chair into camera view.

He never gets out of the chair, but looks at Green and scoots away. A female patient who was in and out of the room finally brings a clinic staffer to check the woman and a crash cart is summoned.

The medical chart claims she was "sitting quietly in [the] waiting room" at 6:20 a.m., although she was already dead. The cause of death is still under investigation.

Her medical chart claims the Jamaica native got up to walk to the bathroom when she was actually writhing on the floor, the News reported. The records also have Green sitting quietly in her chair when she was already dead.

"Thank God for the videotape because no one would have believed this could have happened," Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the Daily News.
The agency that runs the municipal hospital — the city's Health and Hospitals Corp. — fired six staffers, including the two security guards.

The Democratic platform calls for a universal health care system to be implemented. This government run system would provide mandatory health coverage for everyone in the country. The idea is supported by the usual liberal elite. These folk fervently support a government run public school system for everyone else; but then send their children to private schools. and loudly endorse a government run health care system, but will not be be using those government facilities either. What do they know, that you may not? Read on and just say NO!

On June 19, 2008, Esmin Green, a 49-year old native of Jamaica, died in the waiting room of hospital's G Building, a psychiatric ward. Videotape shows several guards and even a doctor walking through the camera view without doing anything to help the woman, who was prone on the floor. In addition, records were falsified, stating her status at times which the time-stamped video prove false, even going so far as to giving reports about her status after she was apparently dead. Several people were fired in the immediate aftermath, and investigations and lawsuits are pending. This incident came in the midst of a federal lawsuit charging neglect by the hospital.[6]

Kings County Hospital Center was founded 175 years ago, when Brooklyn was its own city and construction of the Brooklyn Bridge would not begin for almost 40 years. Over the decades, Kings County has claimed many "firsts" in the field of medicine: it was the site of the first open-heart surgery performed in New York State; Kings County physicians invented the world's first hemodialysis machine, conducted the first studies of HIV infection in women and produced the first human images using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In addition, Kings County was named the first Level 1 Trauma Center in the U.S.

To people around the world who have seen the video, Esmin Green is a symbol of a health-care system that seems to have failed horribly.

Green, 49, is shown rolling off a waiting room chair at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, on June 19. She lands face-down on the floor, convulsing.

Surveillance video captures her lying on the floor for more than an hour as several hospital workers see her and appear to ignore her. She died there.

But to fellow members of her church, she was known as "Sister Green." Together, they served as a family for her in the decade after she left Jamaica for New York.

Green left six children in Jamaica -- the youngest now 14. She had been sending money home.  Watch 'Sister Green' in church »

Her oldest daughter, 31-year-old Tecia Harrison, told CNN that she cannot bear to think of her mother's last moments.

"I haven't seen it, and I don't think I have the heart or mind to watch it because that's my mother there," Harrison said. "That's the woman who gave birth to me 31 years ago. I cannot watch that."

Green was involuntarily admitted to the hospital's psychiatric emergency department June 18 for "agitation and psychosis."