Nurse, Doctor Roles Probed in Cancer Death

An elderly Garden Grove woman whose death last November was attributed to breast cancer may have died after a hospital nurse allegedly injected her with a lethal dose of potassium, police said Tuesday.

The woman’s family was told that she died of complications from breast cancer, from which she had been suffering for several years, and a death certificate listed the cause of death as “metastatic breast cancer.”

Steve Williams, a Fountain Valley police investigator, said officers began looking into the woman’s death at FHP Fountain Valley Hospital after state officials were contacted by an FHP employee.

Police are also reviewing the role of physicians involved in the woman’s care and the subsequent preparation of the death certificate, Williams said, but he added that no physicians had been targeted in the probe.

An FHP spokeswoman said the hospital is cooperating with the investigation but declined to comment on the allegations. She said the nurse in question no longer works at the hospital.

Williams said Francis J. Johnson, 74, was admitted to the hospital for respiratory problems on Nov. 13, 1989, and died the following day.

But Williams said that investigators now believe that Johnson may have died “as a result of an FHP nurse administering the wrong medication,” which he described as potassium. Williams said it had not been ruled out that the death was caused by the nurse accidentally administering the wrong dosage of medication.

The death certificate, obtained by The Times and dated Nov. 15, 1989, was signed by Dr. Sabry Ghaly, identified by FHP as a staff physician. Attempts to reach Ghaly for his comments were unsuccessful.

Williams said the investigation began in June, nearly seven months after Johnson’s death, when an unidentified employee at FHP alerted the state Department of Consumer Affairs that she may have died of something other than breast cancer.

Investigators with the Orange County district attorney’s office, the Orange County coroner’s office and state Consumer Affairs Department, which regulates nursing, are involved in the inquiry, Williams said.

Ria Carlson, an FHP spokeswoman, identified the nurse involved as Maureen Daubert, who she said stopped working at the 99-bed hospital on Nov. 21--seven days after Johnson’s death. Carlson declined to say why Daubert had left the hospital.

“Because the investigation is ongoing, it would be inappropriate for us to say anything more,” Carlson said.

Williams said Daubert had left the state but already had been interviewed once by investigators from Consumer Affairs. He said police also want to question her. Daubert could not be reached for comment.

Investigators said that Johnson was “having problems breathing” when she was admitted to the hospital the day before she died. Williams said she apparently went into cardiac arrest almost immediately after being injected with 40 milliequivalents of potassium. He said attempts to resuscitate her failed.

“At this point, it’s still pretty early to tell what exactly happened,” Williams said. “There are several people that still need to be interviewed,” including the attending physicians.

After her death, Johnson’s body was donated to the USC School of Dentistry. No autopsy was performed at the time. Last month, with the investigation under way, coroner’s investigators retrieved the body from USC and performed an autopsy, the results of which have not been released.

A coroner’s official said a new death certificate will be issued.

At Johnson’s Garden Grove home Tuesday, her son, Garry Garcia, said he had been told of the police investigation only recently. Garcia said police have updated him on the status of the investigation, but he declined to elaborate.

At the time of his mother’s death, Garcia said, the family had no clue that anything was amiss when doctors told them she had died of breast cancer.

“There was no reason for us to believe anything other than what they told us,” said Garcia, an Army logistics specialist.

His mother, who Garcia said was a secretary and had retained her maiden name for professional reasons, had been diagnosed with cancer several years ago. He described her as “a real strong, real religious woman.”

Garcia said news of the investigation was disturbing because the family believes that Johnson’s death directly contributed to the death of his 73-year-old father, George Garcia, less than two months later.

“After she died, my dad said, ‘I don’t want to live anymore,’ ” Garcia said. “He completely stopped eating for a week. He told everybody (that he wanted to die). He sat out in his wheelchair quite a bit in the front yard and said that.”

On Jan. 7, George Garcia, who had been wheelchair-bound because of an old injury sustained on his job as a painter, died of a heart attack.

“They were very, very close,” Garcia said of his parents. “They were married for 37 years.”

Dr. Eric Alcouloumre, associate director of the emergency care unit at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, said that death could be caused by administering too much potassium in one dose or a recommended amount of potassium too quickly. Too much potassium “causes the heart to stop. If a patient received a rapid or large infusion of potassium, it could cause death,” he said.

Dr. Sandy Gordon, assistant professor of emergency medicine at UCI Medical Center, said that patients receiving nutrients intravenously have an acute need for intravenous potassium.

“When you’re not taking potassium by mouth, you are losing it in urine and you need to replace it at a maintenance level,” Gordon said. “Many patients on diuretics lose even more” so there is an acute need to replace it.

Staff writers Jeanne Wright and Lanie Jones contributed to this report.