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Claim filed in sailor death at hospital

A Jacksonville, Fla., lawyer has filed a $5 million claim against the Navy after what he said was medical malpractice that led to the death of a Navy P-3 radar operator at Naval Hospital Jacksonville.

Sean Cronin, a former Navy P-3 pilot who left the Navy to become a civilian medical malpractice lawyer, said he expects the Navy, the U.S. District Court at Jacksonville, and a federal appeals court in Atlanta to deny the malpractice claim because of a federal doctrine that prohibits active-duty service members from suing the federal government for negligence.

But Cronin said he hopes that the Supreme Court will take the case on appeal and overturn the 57-year-old Feres Doctrine, and in the process allow the family of Aviation Warfare Systems Operator 3rd Class Nathan Hafterson to recover damages for a death that Cronin and at least one medical expert say was preventable.

Cronin said he is hopeful for two reasons. He says the stated purpose of the Feres Doctrine — to prevent military discipline problems caused by subordinates suing their superiors — does not apply in medical malpractice cases, because military health-care specialists are normally outside a service member’s chain of command.

Also, Cronin said the recent scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., has opened many Americans’ eyes to the fact that service members do not always get quality medical care.

Cronin and Hafterson’s family acknowledged that convincing the Supreme Court to reverse Feres is a long shot. But the lawyer said it’s the only option.

“This is the only recourse that the family has,” Cronin said. “They know it is an uphill battle. They want to go ahead with it because even if the claim is kicked out of court, it is important to raise awareness and to encourage doctors to remain current on the standard of care.”

Hafterson, a competitive bodybuilder and avid fan of actor Jim Carrey, was admitted to Naval Hospital Jacksonville in March of last year after he was found unresponsive in his barracks room. Navy doctors diagnosed and correctly treated a blood sugar problem, Cronin said, but decided to place a tube in his throat to help him breathe after his breathing did not immediately return to normal. To do so, they needed to give him a commonly prescribed muscle relaxant, succinylcholine. Hafterson’s body responded negatively to it, and his body temperature spiked to 105 degrees.

Cronin said Navy doctors waited several hours before giving Hafterson, 21, an antidote, Dantroline, a treatment Cronin maintains would’ve saved Hafterson’s life if given sooner.

“It should have been given within two minutes,” Cronin said. “That’s how well-known this is.”

Hafterson’s mother, Barbara, a registered nurse in Ogden, Utah, said she doubted that any medical professional would not know to use it as an antidote to a fairly common reaction.

Navy doctors, unsure of what to do, made three phone calls — two to a local poison control center, the last to the Malignant Hyperthermia Hotline at the University of California at Los Angeles, before they found that the medicine was needed to revive him.

By time they administered Dantroline, Hafterson had begun to develop other complications related to his body overheating.

Although the antidote and other treatments quickly lowered his body temperature, Hafterson’s muscles had begun to leach potentially fatal levels of potassium into his bloodstream. He was transferred to intensive care while doctors decided what to do.

Hafterson’s mother told Navy Times that doctors considered transferring her son to a civilian hospital, where he could undergo dialysis to have potassium taken from his bloodstream, but he went into cardiac arrest and died before he could be moved.

“More delays, more indecision,” she said. “They were essentially in well over their heads.”

Cronin alleges that part of the problem was that even though Jacksonville Naval Hospital had an emergency room, its doctors were used to dealing with more mundane illnesses. He said any of the four civilian hospital emergency rooms in the area would probably have not made the same mistake because they were more used to treating more serious cases. But the ambulance took Hafterson to Naval Hospital Jacksonville because he was in the Navy, Cronin said.

“My client would have been better off if they had gone to a civilian hospital,” he said.

Naval Hospital Jacksonville officials declined to comment on the Hafterson case because of patient privacy concerns, but Cronin shared with Navy Times an affidavit signed by Saul Weinstein, a Jacksonville-area emergency room doctor and state certified expert witness. It said that Hafterson died because the doctors on duty at the Navy hospital failed to do their job “by failing to timely treat malignant hyperthermia caused by succinylcholine infusion with the specific antidote, Dantroline.”

“The ... departures from standards of reasonable and acceptable medical practice, caused or substantially contributed to the death of Nathan Nicholas Hafterson,” the statement continued.

“Why does the president have access to first-rate care at Bethesda and not our troops?” Barbara Hafterson asked. “I don’t know why substandard medical care is OK. Nate did not have confidence in this facility. He expressed that to me. And then sure enough, he goes there and this happens.”

Nate Hafterson, who had recently passed the second class petty officer examination, is survived by his mother and father, sister, and a wife from whom he had recently separated, although the two remained friendly, his mother said.

“Somehow we have learned how to survive what we thought was unsurvivable,” she said.