Baltimore Jury Awards $5.87 Million After Hospital Staff Failed to Treat Post-Operative Cardiac Tamponade
After trial: After the Maryland cap; $5.87 million jury verdict.
Won by Gilman & Bedigian.
A Baltimore City jury returned a $5.87 million wrongful-death verdict against the University of Maryland Medical System after hospital staff failed to recognize and treat cardiac tamponade in a heart-surgery patient, delaying specialist intervention for more than an hour while she deteriorated.
What happened
Elsie Mae Mason underwent heart valve replacement surgery at the University of Maryland Medical Center on June 10, 2016. The procedure itself was completed, but the days that followed proved fatal. On June 13, three days after surgery, Mason went into cardiac arrest and suffered severe brain damage. She died six days later on June 19, 2016.
The cause, according to the lawsuit filed by her adult children in 2018, was cardiac tamponade: a buildup of fluid around the heart that compresses it and prevents normal pumping. Cardiac tamponade is a recognized complication of open-heart procedures, and the medical records generated by UMMS itself referenced the condition repeatedly. Despite those notations, the hospital's defense at trial was that Mason never developed the complication at all.
Plaintiff attorneys Michael V. McCubbin and H. Briggs Bedigian of Gilman and Bedigian LLC in Timonium presented the hospital's own records as the heart of the case. The records documented the signs of tamponade while staff on the ground failed to act on them. Specialists were not summoned for more than an hour after Mason began deteriorating. In cardiac emergencies, the attorneys argued, the delay itself is the injury: minutes determine whether the heart recovers or fails.
Jury selection began January 6, 2020, in Baltimore City Circuit Court before Judge Marcus Z. Shar. After several days of testimony and hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict on January 14, 2020, awarding Mason's estate and children $62,177 in economic damages, $9,972 in funeral expenses, and $5.8 million in noneconomic damages, for a total of $5,872,149. Maryland law caps noneconomic damages in personal-injury cases, reducing that portion to approximately $962,500. UMMS said it was evaluating post-trial options and did not believe the verdict was supported by the evidence.
The verdict ranked among the larger medical-malpractice awards in Maryland for 2020. No appellate opinion reversing or modifying the judgment has been identified in public court records.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Gilman & Bedigian
All Gilman & Bedigian proven verdicts →A Philadelphia jury returned a $182.7 million verdict, later reaching $207.6 million with interest and upheld through the Pennsylvania Superior Court in July 2025, against the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for a 45-minute delay in performing a C-section on a mother with a known uterine infection, leaving her child with permanent cerebral palsy.
A Philadelphia jury awarded $108.6 million to a boy who suffered permanent brain damage during a December 2018 forceps delivery at Einstein Medical Center, in a case tried by Gilman & Bedigian against Jefferson Health. Jefferson has vowed to appeal, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is already reviewing the same liability doctrines in the firm's earlier $183 million Penn Medicine verdict, so the award is far from final.
A Baltimore City jury awarded $55 million after Johns Hopkins Hospital delayed an emergency cesarean section for more than two hours following a home-birth transfer, leaving infant Enzo Martinez with permanent cerebral palsy and profound neurological injuries.
A Baltimore County jury found that University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center performed an unjustified emergency cesarean section on a mother showing no confirmed signs of labor, delivering her son at 23 weeks and causing severe brain damage that will require lifelong care.
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