Tripler Army Medical Center Delivery Errors Yield $11 Million Federal Settlement for Brain-Damaged Infant

On the evening of November 11, 2005, a Navy family arrived at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu showing clear signs of fetal distress. The attending physicians and a supervising resident both concluded the baby needed to be delivered immediately. Despite that shared assessment, delivery did not happen for close to an hour, the product of what attorneys would later characterize in court as an astounding failure of communication among the medical team.

When the infant was finally born, she arrived limp and not breathing. A first-year intern was assigned to resuscitate her. The intern inserted an endotracheal tube intended to deliver oxygen to the lungs, but placed it in the esophagus instead of the trachea. For more than forty minutes, oxygen was pumped into the baby's stomach while her lungs, heart, and brain received none. Senior physicians did not catch the error until the damage was already done. The newborn also suffered blood loss from inadequate umbilical cord clamping and required a transfusion.

The diagnosis was spastic quadriplegia with cerebral palsy, caused by prolonged oxygen deprivation during birth. The child would never walk, speak, or care for herself. She requires tube feeding and round-the-clock assistance for life. Her family, stationed in Hawaii because of her father's Navy service, eventually resettled in Texas.

Davis Levin Livingston attorneys Mark Davis and Michael Livingston filed suit against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act. The case was docketed in U.S. District Court in Honolulu before Judge David Ezra. Through pretrial litigation, the attorneys built a record of the full chain of failures: the communication breakdown that delayed delivery, the misplaced airway tube that went undetected for forty-plus minutes, the inadequate cord management, and the pattern of placing inexperienced physicians in high-risk deliveries with insufficient supervision.

The case settled in March 2010, on the eve of federal trial. The settlement amount, $11 million, was large enough under FTCA procedures to require personal approval from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, a step reserved for the government's largest tort payouts. The funds were placed in an annuity to cover the child's medical care, equipment, and assistance for life. Tripler Army Medical Center publicly acknowledged full responsibility and stated that it had put new procedures in place.

The child was four years old when the settlement was finalized.