$32.5 Million Settlement for Boy Left with Severe Brain Injury After Reading Hospital Birth
Won by Ross Feller Casey.
Ross Feller Casey secured a $32.5 million settlement against Reading Hospital after its labor and delivery team failed to recognize signs of intra-amniotic infection and delayed a C-section, leaving a boy born in 2018 with permanent hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy.
What happened
In September 2018, Miranda Garcia went to Reading Hospital in Berks County, Pennsylvania, to deliver her child. During labor, signs of an intra-amniotic infection developed, a condition commonly called chorioamnionitis. According to the lawsuit filed by Ross Feller Casey, the obstetrics team failed to administer antibiotics when those warning signs appeared and did not respond adequately to indicators of fetal distress.
The delayed emergency Cesarean section that followed allowed oxygen deprivation to progress long enough to cause hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, a form of brain damage resulting from inadequate blood and oxygen flow to a newborn's brain. Compounding the harm, the hospital team also failed to administer therapeutic hypothermia, the only accepted intervention for limiting HIE injury, in the critical window after birth.
By the time the family filed suit in 2022, the boy's condition had become extensive. He developed spastic quadriplegia, cannot speak, has cortical blindness, and requires a feeding tube and around-the-clock nursing care. The lawsuit named Reading Hospital and obstetrician Dominic Cammarano as defendants.
Trial began in April 2024 at the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. After opening arguments, the parties reached a $32.5 million settlement. Reading Hospital agreed to pay without admitting fault or liability.
Attorneys Matt Casey, Jennifer Russell, and Scott Vezina represented the family for Ross Feller Casey. The $32.5 million figure was reported at the time as a record-level medical malpractice settlement in Pennsylvania.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Ross Feller Casey
All Ross Feller Casey proven verdicts →A Philadelphia jury awarded $85 million to a University of Pennsylvania medical student left disabled after falling 18 feet into an open Trigen Energy manhole at 19th and Walnut Streets, the largest personal injury verdict in the United States for 2008.
Joel Feller and Matt Casey of Ross Feller Casey represented seven of the 26 survivors who reached a global civil settlement with Penn State University totaling $59.7 million, the largest single-firm contingent in the proceedings.
A Philadelphia jury awarded Andrea Tate $44.1 million after the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania stopped monitoring her blood-clotting levels mid-treatment, allowing heparin to build to a dangerous concentration that caused a massive brain hemorrhage following routine tumor surgery.
A York County jury awarded James Spangler a record $23.87 million after neurosurgeon Dr. Joseph Krzeminski inserted a screw into his spinal cord during a routine back procedure at WellSpan York Hospital and kept operating despite active monitoring alarms signaling catastrophic nerve damage.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.