$8 Million Settlement After Clinic Documented Signs of Abuse on Infant and Never Reported Them
After trial: Approved by the court and final at $8,000,000. A tentative $10,000,000 figure was announced in February 2022, but the settlement approved in August 2022 was $8,000,000.
Won by Garmey Law.
Alexandria Orduna brought her son to a Brewer clinic repeatedly from the time he was four days old. Staff saw and documented red-flag signs of physical abuse and never told her and never reported it to the state, as Maine law requires. At about six and a half months old he was beaten so badly he nearly died. He is permanently blind and brain-injured.
What happened
Alexandria Orduna, then living in Orono, Maine, began bringing her son to Brewer Medical Center when he was four days old. She kept bringing him back.
The suit alleged that clinic staff saw and documented red-flag signs that the baby was being physically abused by Orduna's then-boyfriend, and that they never told her and never reported it to the state, which Maine law requires them to do.
On January 10, 2019, when the boy was about six and a half months old, he was beaten so severely that he nearly died. The emergency department at Eastern Maine Medical Center found a fractured skull, bleeding in the brain and a fractured left femur. He is permanently blind and permanently brain-injured.
The boyfriend pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and assault on a child and was sentenced to nine years with four to serve.
The reason this was a federal case is worth explaining. Brewer Medical Center is operated by Penobscot Community Health Care, a federally qualified health center, which makes its staff federal employees for liability purposes. So the claim ran against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act.
The government argued that health care providers owe no duty to report suspected child abuse. Judge Lance E. Walker rejected that, and that ruling is what made the case survivable at all.
As Terry Garmey put it to reporters, the child's body told the story like a cave painting there to be seen, interpreted and investigated, and it did not happen.
A tentative settlement of $10 million was announced in February 2022. The settlement finally approved in August 2022 was $8 million, most of it funding a lifetime care trust that pays out about $17,000 a month.
Orduna was represented by Terry D. Garmey and Alexis Garmey Chardon of Portland. Her son is not named here because he is a child.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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