Broward Jury Awards $24.5 Million to Family of Mother Who Bled to Death After Childbirth

Lilia Torres was 34 and at the end of her fourth pregnancy when she arrived at a Broward County hospital in July 2015 for a cesarean delivery. She carried a diagnosis that should have changed how that delivery was handled. Spotting in the eighth week of the pregnancy had led to a finding of placenta previa with a possible placenta accreta, a condition in which the placenta grows too deeply into the uterine wall and cannot separate normally after birth. Her family later argued that a team aware of that risk should have ordered an MRI to rule the accreta in or out, and should have used a higher uterine incision to avoid cutting through the placenta itself. Neither happened, and the surgery went ahead at 39 weeks, a day after it had been scheduled. Torres's daughter was born safely. Her mother then lost at least ten liters of blood and died of hemorrhagic shock and multi-organ failure, leaving a husband and four children, including the newborn.

Her husband, Rodolfo Vargas-Chavez, sued on behalf of her estate in Florida's Seventeenth Judicial Circuit. The defendants, four physicians (Adolfo Gonzalez-Garcia, Jorge Gallo, Julio Coello, and Kei Nakanishi) and the practice group Phoenix Obstetrics Gynecology, LLC, conceded negligence and causation before the case reached a jury. That left a two-day trial in April 2019 focused on a single question: what the family's loss was worth.

Defense counsel Russ Schell of Schell Cooley did not dispute that the death was a tragedy. He told jurors the job in front of them was to fairly and adequately compensate the family for the loss of a fine woman, and argued that they had moved forward in its wake as well as they possibly could. Todd Michaels of The Haggard Law Firm, representing the family alongside Daniel Harwin of Freedland Harwin Valori, answered that what looked like moving on was a set of choices to keep going: a husband honoring the commitment he had made to his wife, children still trying to make their mother proud, all of them carrying the loss every day.

The jury deliberated for about two hours before returning its verdict on April 17, 2019: $24.5 million in total, made up of $3,675,000 to Vargas-Chavez, $4.9 million each to three of Torres's children, and $6,125,000 to the youngest child, who had been born shortly before her mother's death. Harwin told Courtroom View Network afterward that jurors had connected with the testimony of Torres's husband and children, and that he believed they understood what the family had been through and how hard the years ahead would be.

Florida's statutory cap on noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases, which once would have limited an award like this one, had already been struck down as unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court, first for wrongful death claims in 2014 and then for personal injury claims in 2017. No cap applied to reduce the jury's award. No appeal of the verdict, and no public record of how it was ultimately paid or resolved, has surfaced since.