Medical Center Accused of Negligence in Death of Woman After Fire

The mother of a mentally retarded woman has filed a $5-million wrongful-death lawsuit against Los Angeles County, charging that County-USC Medical Center employees were negligent when they allowed a fire to start in her daughter’s hospital bed.

The victim, Glenda Citizen, 39, of Los Angeles, died at her Watts-area home Feb. 9, six days after being discharged from the hospital and less than three weeks after the fire.

According to a death certificate filed at the county Hall of Records, the victim’s immediate cause of death was acute bronchopneumonia “as a consequence of” burns.

An autopsy by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said the burns were self-inflicted and covered more than 20% of her body.

A Fire Department report said it is unclear how the fire started. Citizen’s arms were tied to her bed at the time of the blaze. How tight the restraints were--and thus how much she could move her arms--was not clear.

The victim suffered “severe and disabling burns” from the fire and was “in no condition to be moved” when she was discharged Feb. 3, according to the lawsuit filed June 17 by Los Angeles lawyer Arnold Stein.

A surgical resident who treated Citizen’s burns said in an interview Monday, however, that the fire could not have caused her death.

“She didn’t die from her burns,” Dr. Robert Sigal said.

Sigal, on a one-month tour of the hospital’s burn unit last January, said her burns “covered 9% of her body . . . a small area of her stomach and her flanks.”

Sigal said by telephone from Philadelphia, where he is participating in a University of Pennsylvania training program, that he did not talk to a Los Angeles County coroner’s investigator about the case.

In an autopsy report issued April 10, the investigator said Sigal had observed burns over 40% of the victim’s body.

Sigal said the victim was examined at the hospital’s burn unit clinic three days before she died. “Everything was found to be in order,” he said.

The victim’s mother, Virgie Levine, 69, said a hospital official telephoned her the afternoon of Jan. 15 and said her daughter had suffered “major burns.”

She said her daughter came home bandaged over half of her body and receiving oxygen. A few hours before her death, her daughter was drinking water “as fast as it would go in her,” her mother said.

Levine said she sought legal help shortly after her daughter died to motivate public officials to upgrade patient care at the county facility.

Hospital officials declined to comment.

An official in the state Department of Health Services, Jacqueline Lincer, said the agency opened an investigation Monday to determine whether any state hospital licensing laws were violated when hospital officials failed to file an “unusual occurrence” report with her office.

Sigal was quoted in the coroner’s autopsy report as saying the victim “was a chronic schizophrenic and apparently heard voices from within her head, telling her to set herself ablaze. From an unknown source, the decedent obtained matches and did just that.”

The victim’s mother disputes this view and charges that her daughter died because of improper hospital care. “She was unattended,” the mother claimed.

“It is not fair to portray this incident as an example of understaffing in county hospitals,” Sigal said. “I’m not sure the outcome would have been different if she had been in a private hospital.

“She was placed near the nurse’s station. . . . We were taking care of her. To say that there was negligence may be unfair. If there had been 30 orderlies on duty, things might not have been any different.”

The victim, the coroner’s report said, had been picked up by police, who said she was “drunk in public” and placed her in the hospital’s psychiatric ward for observation.

The report does not address the question of how she could have set herself ablaze while in restraints.

Levine said her daughter’s mental problems stemmed from watching her father fatally shoot her uncle when she was 9 years old. “She never recovered fully,” her mother said.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Roxane Arnold and Craig Quintana.