An LA County coroner’s investigator has accused an anesthesiologist of using a painkiller to hasten the death of a gravely injured boy so that his organs could be harvested without deterioration. The 8-year-old went into cardiac arrest after he nearly drowned in a washing machine in 2013.
Police are investigating.
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On July 31st, Cole Hartman’s father came in from mowing the lawn and found Cole headfirst in a running washing machine. His parents estimated he could have been underwater for up to 25 minutes. While the paramedics did get his heart restarted, physicians told Cole’s family that though he wasn’t brain-dead he would never recover normal neuro function and that it was possible he’d never awake. Cole was taken to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles and later died there when his parents decided to take him off life support and donate his organs.
“The county’s chief medical examiner at the time listed significant causes of death as near-drowning and fragile X syndrome, a genetic abnormality that causes intellectual and physical disabilities.
At the time of the autopsy, coroner’s investigator Denise Bertone raised questions about the dose of the painkiller fentanyl given to the boy and pressed for a re-examination of the case until a subsequent medical examiner added fentanyl toxicity as a significant cause of death.
Bertone’s allegation is outlined in a whistleblower lawsuit she filed last month claiming she suffered work retaliation for raising questions. The county has yet to respond to the suit in court.” 1
The lawyer for the anesthesiologist, Dr. Judith Brill, has called the allegation “factually wrong and patently offensive.”2 (Brill is a professor emeritus of clinical anesthesiology and perioperative medicine at UCLA.)
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The process to harvest organs is a delicate one. In Cole’s case, they had to wait to harvest until a ventilator was removed and his heart stopped beating on its own (contribution after cardiac death). But since organs can begin to deteriorate immediately, some becoming unsuitable for transplantation after 30 minutes, and physicians don’t know for certain whether patients in vegetative states experience pain, the doctor decided to administer painkillers.
UCLA’s policy allows the use of opioids to prevent discomfort but Bertone’s suit and coroner’s records state that the administered dose was 500 micrograms- too much for a child who weighed just 47 pounds.
The child’s manner of death remains open pending the outcome of the police investigation.
