Missed Bowel Ischemia After a Routine Hernia Repair Kills a Chef, $1 Million Verdict
After trial: No appeal or appellate opinion has been reported. The doctor's liability insurer, ProAssurance, was named in trial coverage, but payment was never publicly confirmed.
Won by Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci.
Marcel Bonetti, 73, a chef who had cooked for Playboy Clubs, actor Kevin Costner, singer Tom Jones and former President Jimmy Carter, died in October 2016, days after an uncomplicated umbilical hernia repair. Two days after the operation he went to an emergency room with severe abdominal pain, and emergency physician Dr. Peter McCarthy diagnosed a common post-operative ileus without ordering blood work, a CT scan or a surgical consult. Bonetti kept getting worse until a CT scan two days later showed bowel ischemia; he was septic by the time he reached emergency surgery and died in intensive care that day. His family sued McCarthy and the emergency staffing company that employed him for wrongful death, and in October 2019 a St. Charles County jury awarded them $1,000,000.
What happened
Marcel Bonetti spent much of his career cooking for well known names. Early on he ran the kitchens for several Playboy Clubs, and he later cooked for actor Kevin Costner, singer Tom Jones and former President Jimmy Carter. He was head chef at Bass Pro Shops in Springfield, Missouri, and then personal chef to the company's founder, Johnny Morris. In October 2016, at 73, he had surgery to repair an umbilical hernia. The operation itself was uncomplicated.
Two days later he was back in an emergency room with severe abdominal pain, nausea and rising heart and respiratory rates. Dr. Peter McCarthy, the emergency physician who saw him, ordered an X-ray that showed what might have been a small bowel obstruction. McCarthy read it as an ileus, the common and usually temporary slowdown of the intestines that follows abdominal surgery. He prescribed nausea medication, told Bonetti to drink more fluids and sent him home. He did not order blood work, did not order a CT scan, did not consult Bonetti's surgeon and did not investigate why the heart rate was up.
Two days after that, Bonetti made an emergency trip to his surgeon's office, in worse pain from a distended abdomen and short of breath. The surgeon on call diagnosed an ileus again. He went back to the emergency room the same day with unrelenting vomiting. This time a CT scan showed ischemia, blocked blood flow to the intestines, and a grossly enlarged stomach. Staff tried to drain the stomach through a tube, but the tube ended up in his esophagus. By the time he reached emergency surgery he was septic. Surgeons corrected abdominal compartment syndrome, in which pressure inside the abdomen chokes off blood flow, and he died in the intensive care unit the same day. His wife and adult children obtained a private autopsy.
Bonetti's family, including his adult children Gregory and Brigitte, sued in 2017 in St. Charles County Circuit Court. The defendants were McCarthy and his employer, the emergency staffing company named in the case caption as Southwest Emergency Physicians of Memphis LLC. Roger Johnson and Patrick Martucci of Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci represented the family. Their case was that McCarthy failed to give fluids to a dehydrated patient and failed to look further when the findings did not fit a simple ileus, which let early ischemia run to a death. McCarthy's defense was that Bonetti had reported a bowel movement and that his pain had improved before he was discharged. Tying together the surgery, the two emergency room visits, the office visit, the second surgery and the death was the hardest part of the case, Martucci told Missouri Lawyers Media.
The trial before Judge Michael Fagras ran two weeks. The jury deliberated about three and a half hours before finding McCarthy negligent and finding that he had acted as an agent of his employer. In October 2019 it awarded the family $1,000,000.
Trial coverage listed McCarthy's professional liability carrier as ProAssurance Specialty Insurance Company. No appeal was reported, and the case later appeared in Missouri Lawyers Media's year end ranking of the largest Missouri plaintiff verdicts of 2019.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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