Jury Holds Plastic Surgeon Liable for Death of Teen After Liposuction

Amy Fledderman was an 18-year-old freshman at Penn State University when she decided she wanted liposuction to remove fat from her chin, abdomen and flanks. She had captained her high school tennis team and ran regularly. In May 2001, she and her mother, Colleen, met with Dr. Richard P. Glunk, a plastic surgeon with an office in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. According to trial testimony, Glunk told the Fleddermans that Amy was an athlete, young and healthy, and that she was 'zero risk' for the procedure.

On May 23, 2001, Glunk performed the liposuction in his office, with nurse anesthetist Edward J. DeStefano administering anesthesia. The family alleged that a blood vessel in her neck was severed during the procedure and that she was given a medication she was allergic to. She went into respiratory distress. Rather than call an ambulance, the Fleddermans alleged, Glunk and his staff kept her in the office for about two and a half hours while her mother pleaded for a transfer. She was taken first to Montgomery Hospital and then to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where she died on May 25, 2001, of fat embolism, a condition in which fat enters the bloodstream and lodges in the lungs. In November 2001 the Montgomery County district attorney announced there would be no criminal charges, citing insufficient evidence of criminal negligence to support a homicide case. The state medical board later pursued separate disciplinary proceedings against Glunk's license.

The Fleddermans sued Glunk and DeStefano for medical malpractice and wrongful death in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. The case went to trial before Judge Sheldon C. Jelin and ran five weeks. On May 23, 2008, seven years to the day after the surgery, a jury of nine women and three men returned its verdict after 14 hours of deliberation over three days. The jury found both Glunk and DeStefano negligent and awarded $5.5 million in compensatory damages, allocated 75 percent to Glunk and 25 percent to DeStefano. The compensatory award broke down as $3.5 million under the Survival Act, $2 million to Colleen Fledderman for negligent infliction of emotional distress, $20,000 under the Wrongful Death Act and $5,000 for failure to obtain informed consent. On top of that the jury added $15 million in punitive damages against Glunk alone, for a verdict of $20,525,000. The trial court denied Glunk's post-trial motions and entered judgment in November 2008.

Glunk maintained at trial and afterward that Fledderman died from a rare complication and that he called for help once her breathing became compromised.

Glunk appealed. On November 12, 2010, a three-judge panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the jury's verdict, including the $15 million punitive award, holding that the punitive award was not excessive because Glunk had ignored both the warning signs of a medical emergency and the mother's pleas to send her daughter to a hospital. The panel also held that evidence the office surgical facility was not properly licensed at the time had been properly admitted. The disposition was affirmed in part, reversed in part and remanded; the portion sent back concerned the trial court's refusal to award the Fleddermans delay damages. Reargument was denied on January 19, 2011, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied Glunk's petition for allowance of appeal on June 2, 2011.

Glunk had filed for bankruptcy protection in 2005, and the Fleddermans pursued a federal adversary proceeding in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania seeking to have the judgment debt declared nondischargeable. Maxwell S. Kennerly and Slade H. McLaughlin, then trial attorneys at The Beasley Firm, LLC, are named as counsel for the Fledderman plaintiffs in the bankruptcy court's opinion, and the Philadelphia Inquirer identified McLaughlin of the Beasley Firm as the family's lawyer when the verdict came in.