$30 Million Verdict After a Trauma Surgeon Started a Second Elective Surgery While a Gunshot Patient Waited to Bleed to Death

On December 27, 2013, Johnny Terrell Sledge was shot in the back during a gunfight near Ash Street in west Tuscaloosa. The bullet passed through his left kidney and his abdominal aorta before lodging in his liver. EMS got him to the emergency room at DCH Regional Medical Center by 2:15 that afternoon.

The emergency room physician who examined him recognized that Sledge needed a trauma surgeon in the operating room immediately. He paged Dr. Bradley Bilton, the surgeon on call that day. Bilton was already in the operating room on an elective case. Rather than break off to see a gunshot patient with a lacerated aorta, Bilton told staff to call someone else, then began a second elective surgical procedure.

The trauma team tried to reach other surgeons and could not. DCH's own policy allowed the on-call trauma surgeon to book elective procedures on his call days, on the condition that he arrange his own backup if a trauma case came in while he was tied up. That backup never materialized. At trial, the family's lawyers argued the hospital had no enforced protocol behind that policy, only an informal understanding among surgeons that they would cover for each other, and that understanding failed the one time it mattered.

Sledge waited in the emergency department for roughly two and a half hours, bleeding internally from wounds that needed a surgeon's hands to stop. About ten minutes before he died, Bilton said he was coming down. He never made it. Sledge bled to death in the ER.

The family sued Bilton; his practice group, University Surgical Associates; Dr. George Nunn, DCH's Director of Trauma Services; Dr. Kenneth Aldridge, the hospital's Chief Medical Officer; and DCH Health Care Authority, the entity that operates DCH Regional. The claims against Nunn, Aldridge, and DCH Health Care Authority centered on the on-call system itself: a policy that let a trauma surgeon double-book elective surgery on his trauma days, with no real mechanism to guarantee a backup existed if he was unavailable.

The case went to trial in Tuscaloosa County Circuit Court. David Marsh, Derrick Mills, and Jane Mauzy of Marsh, Rickard & Bryan represented the family, along with Tuscaloosa co-counsel Paul Patterson of Patterson Comer Law Firm. After a two-week trial, the jury returned its verdict on May 21, 2019: $30 million. Under Alabama's wrongful death statute, which allows only punitive damages in a fatal-injury case rather than compensatory damages for pain and loss, the entire award was punitive, a jury's judgment on how seriously to treat a hospital system that let a bleeding patient wait for a surgeon who chose to keep operating on someone else.

Attorney Derrick Mills summed up the family's theory of the case afterward: Sledge, he said, was victimized twice, first by the bullet that struck him as a bystander in someone else's gunfight, and second by an emergency room that let him die waiting for a surgeon who never came.