May 22nd, 2009 Roberts & Roberts
DALLAS — The family of a toddler who died after getting himself tangled in a soccer net has sued a Dallas suburb and responding police officers who the parents claim wasted critical minutes after a 911 call.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Tyler also says emergency responders refused to give CPR instructions to the frantic mother of 21-month-old Matthew Cantrell in the 2007 incident.
The suit claims Murphy police officers mistakenly thought the boy was dead and treated the home like a crime scene by barricading the mother and another son in a bedroom before medical technicians arrived. The suit says police initially refused those technicians access to the boy.
Medical personnel found no pulse when they reached the child, but his heartbeat was later restored in an ambulance, according to the lawsuit. He died three days later in a Dallas hospital, the suit said.
Murphy City Manager James Fisher said Wednesday the city would have no comment until after the City Council is briefed on the case at its next meeting June 1.
Matthew Cantrell became entangled in the net of a backyard soccer goal after his mother fell asleep, The Dallas Morning News reported. His mother, Ave Cantrell, discovered him and couldn’t free him from the netting. She then cut him loose from the netting with scissors and took him to a couch in their home, the lawsuit said.
The mother tried repeatedly to get a 911 dispatcher to tell her how to perform CPR before the dispatcher transferred the call the East Texas Medical Center emergency unit, according the lawsuit. Medical center personnel also did not offer CPR instructions, the suit said. Murphy police have said dispatchers are instructed not to give CPR instructions over the phone, the Morning News reported.
Responding police officers found the mother trying to give her son CPR on the couch and pulled her away from him, the lawsuit said. She was held in another room while Matthew Cantrell went unattended, according to the suit.
By the time medical personnel arrived and performed CPR on the child, it has been nearly 10 minutes since Ave Cantrell’s 911 call, the lawsuit said.
“When you call 911, you think they’re going to help. But here, no one tried to help — not the 911 operator, not the Murphy police officers who were first on the scene. Not one of them tried to save my boy’s life,” Michael Cantrell, the boy’s father, said in a statement released by his attorneys.
An attorney for East Texas Medical Center didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
The lawsuit seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages.
By SCHUYLER DIXON Associated Press Writer © 2009 The Associated Press
May 20, 2009, 3:01PM
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May 18th, 2009 Roberts & Roberts
Thousands of law enforcement officers across the nation will enforce seat belt laws May 18-31 during the annual “Click It or Ticket” campaign.
This year’s campaign will focus on teen drivers and nighttime driving. Research (.pdf file) from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that of the 4,540 16- to 20-year-old passenger vehicle occupants killed in 2007, approximately 2,502 were unbelted at the time of the crash. The odds of being killed in a motor vehicle crash are three times greater at night and if the driver is not using a seat belt. In 2007, 65 percent of the 16- to 20-year-olds killed in nighttime crashes were unbelted at the time.
Seat belt use is the most effective protection against serious crash injuries, reducing the risk by 50 percent, according to NHTSA. In 2008, seat belt use nationwide was 83 percent. The Department of Transportation estimates that 1,652 lives could be saved and 22,373 serious injuries avoided each year on America’s roadways if seat belt use rates rose to 90 percent in every state. New DOT data also estimates that seat belts saved approximately 15,147 lives in 2007.
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May 12th, 2009 Roberts & Roberts
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
msnbc.com
updated 7:23 a.m. CT, Tues., May 12, 2009
Study tracks 41 percent rise in injuries from tipping furniture
Samara Brinkley dozed off just for a moment as she was watching cartoons on TV with her 4-year-old daughter.
Then “I heard the boom, and I woke up and I [saw] my child laying on the floor, and I [saw] a pool of blood coming out in the back of her head,” said Brinkley, 26, of Jacksonville, Fla.
Dymounique Wilson, one of Brinkley’s two daughters, died last Wednesday when the family’s 27-inch television fell over on her.
Nearly 17,000 children were rushed to emergency rooms in 2007, the last year for which complete figures were available, after heavy or unstable furniture fell over on them, a new study reported this month. The study, published in the journal Clinical Pediatrics by researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, found that the such injuries had risen 41 percent since 1990.
The increase correlated with the popularity of ever-bigger flat-panel televisions that Americans have brought into their homes in that time, along with the entertainment centers and narrow, less-stable stands to hold them. Injuries from televisions alone accounted for nearly half of all injuries related to falling furniture during the study period — 47 percent.
Three-quarters of the victims of falling furniture are younger than 6 years old, and children that age “simply don’t recognize the danger of climbing on furniture,” said Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
That makes it imperative that parents take steps to secure flat-panel TVs, which have narrow centers of gravity, and other top-heavy pieces, said Yvonne Holguin-Duran, a child safety specialist with University Health System in San Antonio, Texas.
“If we just take one glance around our house, [parents can] see what safety dangers on their level these children can get into,” Holguin-Duran said.
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Like many other childhood bumps and bruises, most of the injuries related to falling furniture were minor. But 3 percent of the 264,200 children whose cases were reviewed from 1990 to 2007 were injured seriously enough to require hospital admission — most of them for head and neck injuries — and about 300 of them died.
The report “demonstrates the inadequacy of current prevention strategies and underscores the need for increased prevention efforts,” Smith said.
The number of accidents has risen even as regulators have paid more attention to the problem since 2004, after ASTM International (formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials) published revised voluntary manufacturing standards to reduce the likelihood that big furniture pieces could tip over.
There is only so far current technology can go to make a modern television stable, however, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania pointed out in a 2006 study of the hazards of modern TVs.
Americans have fallen in love with flat-panel displays, which often pack as much as a hundred pounds of circuitry and glass into a panel only a few inches thick. They are top-heavy and are expected to balance, more or less precariously, on lightweight stands or to hang from wall brackets that are often inexpertly installed by home do-it-yourselfers.
By contrast, older cathode ray tube sets were big and blocky. While they, too, were, relatively unstable, with most of their weight at the front, they did incorporate a broader base with a lower center of gravity, which allowed them to rest more stably on the floor or on a tabletop.
And homeowners eager to get to watching their new sets frequently ignore instructions for how to secure their consoles.
“In our study population, none of the televisions or the furniture that they were placed on was secured,” the Penn researchers said.
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May 8th, 2009 Roberts & Roberts
The suicide of a teenager in a home for suicidal children in Seattle has resulted in a lawsuit against the program.
SEATTLE —
The suicide of a teenager in a home for suicidal children in Seattle has resulted in a lawsuit against the program.
The case for unspecified damages was filed Thursday by Steven Bunch, father of the late Ashlie Bunch, against the McGraw Residential Center, a program of the Seattle Children’s Home.
The 15-year-old girl hanged herself on Jan. 29, 2008, with shoelaces she had been given by a staff member. According to the lawsuit, she was not supposed to have shoelaces because she had previously attempted suicide. State investigators also determined that she had not been checked by a staff member every five minutes as required.
Gena Palm, executive director of the children’s home, says her organization has not been served with the lawsuit and she won’t comment on it.
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May 7th, 2009 Roberts & Roberts
By BEN EVANS, Associated Press Writer Ben Evans, Associated Press Writer – Wed May 6, 7:56 pm ET
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is proposing that the government provide $1.25 billion to settle discrimination claims by black farmers against the Agriculture Department.
The White House said the money would be included in the president’s 2010 budget request to be unveiled Thursday.
Obama had taken criticism earlier this year from black farmers and lawmakers who said the federal government was neglecting the need for more money to fund claims under a decade-old class-action lawsuit against the government.
In a statement, Obama said the proposed settlement funds would “close this chapter” in the agency’s history and allow it to move on.
“My hope is that the farmers and their families who were denied access to USDA loans and programs will be made whole and will have the chance to rebuild their lives and their businesses,” he said.
John Boyd, who has spearheaded the litigation as head of the National Black Farmers Association and has been particularly critical of Obama recently, called the proposal a “step in the right direction.”
But he said more money would be needed.
“We think this is a good step in the negotiating process. We’re glad to know this issue is on the president’s radar screen and we commend him for taking this step,” he said. But “we need to make sure that none of the black farmers are left out.”
At issue is the class-action Pigford lawsuit, named after Timothy Pigford, a black farmer from North Carolina who was among the original plaintiffs. Thousands of farmers sued USDA claiming they had for years been denied government loans and other assistance that routinely went to whites. The government settled in 1999 and has paid out nearly $1 billion in damages on almost 16,000 claims.
Since then, other farmers have pushed to reopen the case because they missed deadlines for filing. Many said they didn’t know that damages were available.
Last year, Congress passed a proposal sponsored by then-Sen. Obama and others to give more farmers a chance at a settlement. But the measure included a budget of only $100 million — far short of what is likely needed. With an estimated 65,000 additional claims, some estimate the case could cost the government another $2 billion or $3 billion.
While Obama’s proposal represents a marked shift from the Bush administration, which had fought paying new claims, it was unclear how the plan might be received on Capitol Hill. Many lawmakers think the payments should not be capped and that the government should pay however much it costs to resolve successful claims.
Earlier this week, Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Kay Hagan, D-N.C., introduced legislation that would allow access to an unlimited judgment fund at the Department of Treasury to pay successful claims
“I don’t know other fields of litigation where there’s a limit on the payments,” Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., said Wednesday, speaking before the White House announced the proposal.
Most claimants in the original case opted to seek expedited payments that required a relatively low burden of proof. The payments were $50,000 plus $12,500 in tax breaks.
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May 6th, 2009 Roberts & Roberts
By JIM SUHR | Associated Press Writer
4:19 PM CDT, May 3, 2009
ST. LOUIS - The mother of a teenager who died after being shocked with a stun gun during a 2006 confrontation with police in a southwestern Illinois community has settled her wrongful-death lawsuit, still outraged the officers likely won’t be charged.
Rita Cummings on Sunday confirmed that the recent settlement with the city of Jerseyville, Ill., involved a monetary payout in the death of her only child, Roger Holyfield. But the mother, in a telephone interview from her home in Dow, Ill., declined to be more specific.
Messages left Sunday with Jerseyville Police Chief Brad Blackorby were not immediately returned.
Holyfield was 17 on Oct. 28, 2006, when officers in Jerseyville, a community of about 8,000 roughly 50 miles from St. Louis, shocked the Dow teenager at least twice with the stun gun. Officers say the teen turned combative after they approached him while he was carrying a Bible and a cordless telephone and shouting “I want Jesus.”
Police have said Holyfield would not acknowledge the officers who tried to calm him, then became combative and was shot with a stun gun — once after ignoring their warnings, then again when he continued struggling.
Cummings, 40, said her son died at the scene, but emergency workers at the local hospital managed to restart his heart. Holyfield was declared dead the next day at a St. Louis hospital.
A special prosecutor appointed to review the matter later found that two Jerseyville police officers involved in the confrontation were not criminally responsible for Holyfield’s death. Chuck Colburn ruled that the officers “acted in a manner that they had been taught was a safe way to use the instrument,” and that they did not possess the mental state or recklessness to be held criminally responsible.
Colburn cited the findings of Dr. Phillip Burch, a St. Louis pathologist who ruled Holyfield may have died as a result of an agitated mental state called “excited delirium” that some say can send the heart racing until it quits. The teen had no drugs in his system and died of “natural causes,” Burch said.
Colburn wrote that Burch said Holyfield was more susceptible to “excited delirium” because of his well-documented history of mental illness.
“This unfortunate situation began with a common police-citizen encounter and evolved into a tragedy,” Colburn wrote.
The city of Jerseyville has said Burch’s findings exonerate the policemen who handled Holyfield, and that the two officers followed established policy and procedures regarding the use of force and the stun gun.
Cummings isn’t buying that, insisting Sunday that the officers “won’t have to stand up and take blame” and shocked her son with the stun gun even after he was handcuffed and face down.
“If things would not have happened that night, Roger would still be alive. He would not have died on his own,” she said, still angry that the officers who confronted her son “haven’t admitted any wrongdoing” and have eluded charges.
“I don’t feel that justice has been served,” she said. Charges “will never happen, so they get to get on with their lives like nothing. And I, every day, think about my son, and I’m without him because of them.”
She said she settled the lawsuit to end the legal wrangling that “took a toll on me mentally and physically.”
“I need to be able to move forward with my life and get some peace of mind,” she said.
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