The case of the woman left to die in the emergency room at Kings County
Hospital Center
has sparked angry reactions from her relatives and friends.
Esmin Green, 49, was born in Jamaica,
which she left ten years ago for New
York hoping to find a better life and most of all
hoping to provide her family from home enough money for a decent life. Green
was the mother of six children, the youngest now 14 and the oldest 31.
She was known as “Sister Green” for the fellow members of
her church, whom she considered her family from New York. Her friend Peter Pilgrim said the
woman was struggling with losing her job at a day care center and had been
forced to move out of her apartment days before being admitted involuntarily at
the Brooklyn hospital, CNN reports. Pilgrim
had only good words to describe Green: “Esmin Green is a beautiful person. She
has a good heart. She loved people and she loved children.”
Green wasn’t at her first “nervous breakdown,” her pastor
said, according to the same source. Seeing the woman in trouble again, she
decided to call 911 in order to help Green, not knowing that, in return, the
woman would receive only ignorance until the moment of her last breath.
Green was admitted to Kings County
Hospital Center
on June 18 showing signs of agitation and psychosis. She was left waiting in
the emergency room for nearly 24 hours because the hospital had no beds
available at that time. After a day of terrible struggle, she fell off her
chair at 5:32 am on June 19. She was being left on the floor for an
hour, in which time a security guard and a staff member did nothing to help her
although they were clearly seeing what was going on with her. When finally
staff members decided to help her, there was nothing much to be done. She was
dead.
Green’s oldest daughter, Tecia Harrison said she refuses to
think of her mother’s last moments. She also added that she is unable to watch
the surveillance tape showing her mother’s struggle.
“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. That’s the woman who gave
birth to me 31 years ago. I cannot watch that,” Tecia Harrison was quoted by
CNN.
The New York Daily News further quotes her: “I’m going to
put it in the hands of American laws. But I can tell you this: That hospital,
it needs to be closed down.”
Another close friend of Green, Pauline Robinson was simply
shocked by the video and said the hospital staff “should go in jail” for the
way they treated Green.
Until now, the measures taken at the hospital do not seem to
equal the grief and anger of the woman’s family and friends. Only four staff
members were fired, including the hospital’s director of psychiatry and the
head of security, and two were suspended. The city is investigating whether to
press criminal charges.
This is not the first time the Kings County
Hospital Center
confronts with such terrible complaints. According to State Health Department
records, there were 56 citations between January 1, 2005 and June 30, 2007,
many of them being for “incident reporting” and “patients Rights.”
The hospital was sued in May last year by the New York Civil
Liberties Union and the New York State
Mental Hygiene Legal Service for abusing its patients, for keeping them in “overcrowded
and squalid conditionals” and for administering them “unnecessary and punitive
injections of mind-altering drugs” in order to keep them docile, the lawsuit
reads.