Judge Rejects Suit in ‘Angel of Death’ Case

A Burbank judge ruled Friday that the son of one of the alleged victims of “Angel of Death” suspect Efren Saldivar waited too long to sue the former respiratory therapist and the hospital where the victim died.

Superior Court Judge Carl J. West said Larry Schlegel should have filed his lawsuit against Saldivar and Glendale Adventist Medical Center within one year of March 1998, when the former respiratory therapist was first identified as a suspect.

Schlegel instead waited until March of this year, after Glendale police completed their three-year criminal investigation and charged Saldivar with six counts of murder. One count alleges that Saldivar killed Schlegel’s mother, Eleanora, by injecting the paralyzing muscle relaxer Pavulon into her intravenous line.

Although the judge gave Schlegel 30 days to revise the civil complaint, he also told him, “You have a very steep hill to climb.”

The death of the 77-year-old Pasadena woman was among the most heart-wrenching of the six that authorities have cited in their case against Saldivar, 32. She had pneumonia and other ailments when she was taken to the Glendale hospital on Dec. 30, 1996, but doctors said she was improving steadily and her son said she spoke about going home soon when he visited her that New Year’s Eve. Two days later, she was found dead in her hospital bed.

Legal Victory for Hospital

While the ruling Friday covered only the one case, the judge’s interpretation of the deadline for filing the lawsuit is a clear legal victory for the hospital, which seems to have escaped the flood of lawsuits some predicted when the “Angel of Death” investigation began. The judge’s standard also could help discourage any new suits stemming from Saldivar’s work at Glendale Adventist.

“The information [about Saldivar] has been out there for four years,” hospital Vice President Mark Newmyer said Friday. “We’re certainly sympathetic to everyone who’s been affected by what Mr. Saldivar is alleged to have done. . . . But at some point there has to be a cutoff.”

In a preliminary written ruling, West said the one-year statute of limitations began running for Schlegel in March 1998 because that was when the “plaintiff had a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing . . . and thus had a duty at that time to diligently pursue his claim.”

Saldivar was arrested for the first time on March 11, 1998, after confessing to a Glendale detective and a polygraph examiner that he had injected lethal drugs into the intravenous lines of about 40 patients.

Saldivar was released two days later, however, when authorities decided they needed independent evidence to corroborate his statements. Saldivar then recanted his confession, saying he was depressed and had fabricated stories that could result in a death sentence.

During the investigation that followed, Glendale police did not try to identify all the deaths Saldivar might have caused, but focused on the most recent cases, believing they would be the easiest to document. Twenty bodies were exhumed in 1999 and the tissue samples were tested at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where Pavulon was found in at least six, prosecutors have said.

Saldivar was arrested again in January and has been held without bail since. Last week, he was indicted on six counts of murder and one of attempted murder.

The speculation about Glendale Adventist’s civil liability began as soon as police disclosed in 1998 that one of its employees had claimed to have killed dozens of patients. But it proved hard for families of patients to find out if their relatives were among them.

Saldivar gave police no names and said he picked out elderly people whose deaths would not arouse suspicion, such as ones with “do not resuscitate” orders on their charts.

It took more than a year, until April 28, 1999, for the police task force to begin exhuming bodies. And only as the exhumations were carried out did detectives notify the 20 families whose relatives’ deaths were considered the most likely to yield evidence of murder.

By the time Saldivar was arrested again, only a handful of civil suits had been filed against him or the hospital. Some were for deaths that police had never considered suspicious. And relatives of one of the six patients whose death was classified as a homicide, Salbi Asatryan, had already accepted a $60,000 settlement offer from the hospital, the family said.

Relatives of another of the six alleged victims, Jose Alfaro, 82, settled their case last week, according to a court clerk, for an undisclosed amount.

The hospital would not discuss either settlement, but said only seven suits had been filed, with four having been dismissed and only one, Schlegel’s, still pending.

“We’ve dealt in an appropriate manner with every case,” Newmyer said.

Schlegel said he did not think it was appropriate to file his suit until after prosecutors announced that they had found Pavulon in his mother’s body. “Until January, no one knew who tested positive,” he said.

Son Telephoned Police Hotline

But West said Schlegel must have had “a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing” from the start because he phoned a police hotline set up right after Saldivar was identified as a suspect in 1998.

“The fact that plaintiff decided to defer action until others [police agencies] had completed their investigation does not prevent operation of the applicable statute of limitations,” the judge said.

After learning of the ruling, a distraught Schlegel complained that the judge’s timetable meant he would have had to go to court while he still believed his mother’s death was probably from natural causes.

“My advice to anyone is that if someone dies in a hospital, sue ‘em,” he said sarcastically. “Tie up the courtroom with a lawsuit over every death.”

Even if Schlegel is precluded from pursuing a civil case, he could be a witness against Saldivar if the former hospital worker is tried.

Eleanora Schlegel was one of three elderly patients Saldivar is accused of killing within a week, from Dec. 30, 1996, to Jan. 4, 1997. Another died that Jan. 22 and two others in August 1998.

Though authorities have accused Saldivar of causing only the six deaths, and of attempting to kill the seventh patient in 1997, they have left open the possibility of additional counts. “We’re still investigating other things,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Al MacKenzie said after the grand jury indictment last week.

Saldivar is to be arraigned on the latest charges Nov. 5. He pleaded not guilty when initially charged in January.