Two Denver firefighters will serve unpaid suspensions for having a woman pronounced dead though they hadn’t even looked at her.
She was actually alive, and she received medical care only because a police officer saw her moving after the firefighters left.
Emergency responders went to the woman’s home on June 24 because of a call from her father. He said she had recently had stomach surgery and he hadn’t heard from her in several days, though she usually talked to him daily.
A police officer who found the woman told the firefighters outside that her skin was discolored, she was leaking fluids and she smelled of decomposition, according to an official letter that outlined the firefighters’ misconduct.
Without going in, fire Lt. Patrick Lopez called the emergency department physician at Denver Health Medical Center and handed the phone to firefighter Marshall Henry to get a declaration of death.
Henry relayed the police officer’s description of the woman as though he had made the observations himself, saying “she is bloated and obviously dead,” according to the letter. The doctor asked Henry whether the woman had a pulse; Henry said she didn’t.
The doctor pronounced the woman dead.
But after the firefighters left, police officer Eugene McComas went back inside the house and saw the woman moving. He called an ambulance and she was taken to the hospital, the letter states. The woman survived.
Henry reported the incident to an assistant chief the day it happened, according to the letter.
In his statement, Lopez claimed the police officer did not want firefighters to enter the home, though neither McComas nor anyone else on scene remembered that being said.
Lopez, who has been with the Denver Fire Department for 22 years, was demoted two ranks from lieutenant to firefighter and will serve 336 hours of unpaid suspension. Further, he will be fired if he violates another department rule within five years. During that time he will not be eligible for promotion.
Henry will serve a 240-hour unpaid suspension and his emergency medical technician certification was suspended.
“The serious nature of this misconduct cannot be understated — the patient was pronounced, though she was in fact alive, and the medical care she deserved was delayed,” Mary Dulacki, chief deputy executive director of the Denver Department of Public Safety, wrote in the official letter.
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