Jury Awards $3 Million Against Enloe Medical Center After Patient Dies During Device Removal
Won by Wilcoxen Callaham.
A Butte County jury found Enloe Medical Center negligent in the 2009 death of Todd Stewart, who died from internal bleeding after complications arose during a recalled defibrillator removal procedure.
What happened
Todd Stewart had a reason to feel relieved when his doctor told him the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator in his chest was being recalled. The device could come out. What happened next, in January 2009 at Enloe Medical Center in Chico, California, would cost him his life.
During the removal procedure, Stewart developed an internal bleeding complication. The hospital was not prepared to manage it. He had been sedated with the wrong medication and was over-sedated. No surgeon was present when the bleeding began. A surgeon was called in from home but did not arrive in time. By the time staff recognized the complication, it was too late to save him.
Stewart's family retained William Callaham and Michelle Jenni of Wilcoxen Callaham, LLP in Sacramento. The case they built centered not on the complication itself but on the hospital's readiness failures: the wrong sedative, the absence of a surgeon, and the delayed recognition of a known procedural risk.
At trial, Callaham told the jury the case was about 'Enloe's lack of preparation to take care of a patient in the event that complication occurred.' The Stewart family's goal was not only a financial recovery. According to reporting at the time, the widow did not make a settlement demand because she wanted changes to the hospital's practices and protocols, not just a check.
On December 19, 2011, the jury returned a verdict of $3,016,389 against Enloe Medical Center. Enloe CEO Mike Wiltermood said the hospital was surprised and remained confident that staff had performed well. The verdict was the largest malpractice award in Butte County history at that time. It was later recognized among California's top verdicts of 2011 by The Recorder.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Wilcoxen Callaham
All Wilcoxen Callaham proven verdicts →William Callaham won a $2.5 million jury verdict for the parents of a 13-day-old premature infant who died of necrotizing enterocolitis after a nurse practitioner discharged her from the emergency room without a full workup; California's MICRA cap reduced the family's recovery to roughly $255,000.
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