$9.5 Million Settlement for Army Wife Who Died After Tripler Surgeons Reattached Intestine Backward
Won by Davis Levin Livingston.
A 31-year-old Army wife died from sepsis six weeks after surgeons at Tripler Army Medical Center reattached her small intestine backward during a gastric bypass, and the U.S. government agreed to pay her family $9.5 million.
What happened
Julie Bond was 31 years old, the wife of former Army Staff Sgt. Donald Bond and the mother of three children, when a Schofield Barracks physician referred her to Tripler Army Medical Center's bariatric surgery program in November 2020. The planned procedure was a laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, a standard weight-loss operation performed routinely at the Honolulu military hospital.
During the surgery, the operating team reattached Bond's small intestine backward. The error reversed the normal direction of digestive flow and, left undetected, produced an intestinal hernia within three days. A second emergency operation was required to address the hernia, and during that procedure, anesthetists damaged her lungs. Blood clots formed next, a serious but typically treatable complication.
When physicians needed to remove the clots, the thrombectomy machine at Tripler was out of service. The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu was willing to accept Bond and perform the extraction. Her doctors chose a different path: they administered tPA, a clot-dissolving drug that carries a risk of uncontrolled bleeding. The medication caused micro-hemorrhages throughout her brain.
Bond fell into a coma. When she regained awareness, she had developed locked-in syndrome, meaning she was fully conscious but unable to move, speak, or breathe without a ventilator. She remained in that state until she died from sepsis on December 16, 2020, six weeks after the original gastric bypass.
Davis Levin Livingston attorney Loretta A. Sheehan filed suit against the United States government on behalf of Bond's estate and surviving family. Cases against military hospitals proceed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which routes claims through U.S. District Court and requires the government to stand in place of the treating physicians. The complaint traced the specific chain of decisions that compounded the initial surgical error: the delayed recognition of the backward anastomosis, the failure to transfer Bond to a facility with working equipment, and the choice of tPA over mechanical clot removal.
The government agreed to settle for $9.5 million. The settlement was announced in January 2024 and is paid to Donald Bond and the couple's three children.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Honolulu Star-Advertiser: Tripler settles malpractice lawsuit with $9.5M payout·Archived copy
- 2.KITV: Family of Army wife who died after surgery at TAMC to receive $9.5M settlement·Archived copy
- 3.Army Times: Army hospital settles $9.5M malpractice lawsuit after patient's death
- 4.AboutLawsuits.com: Army Hospital Malpractice Lawsuit Results in $9.5M Settlement Over Botched Gastric Bypass Surgery·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Davis Levin Livingston
All Davis Levin Livingston proven verdicts →Thirty-two male survivors of a school-contracted psychiatrist who abused students across more than two decades reached an $80 million settlement with Kamehameha Schools, described at the time as the largest personal-injury settlement in Hawaii history.
A Hawaii circuit court awarded $40 million to a survivor who was raped and sexually assaulted by a Jehovah's Witnesses elder at the Makaha congregation when she was 12 years old.
A Honolulu jury found that Key Principal Partners LLC used a Houston investor's partnership access to study Honsador Lumber's financials, then quietly acquired the company for itself and cut him out of the $50 million deal entirely.
A federal bench trial found that Tripler Army Medical Center's 19-hour failure to treat a one-month-old's midgut volvulus destroyed 90 to 95 percent of her small intestine, leaving her with lifelong disability; U.S. District Judge Michael Seabright awarded the Warren family $29,479,308.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.