Will Grim Saga of Hospital Ever End?

The body count is up to five.

That’s how many people have died at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in the last year because of unspeakable negligence, and those are only the ones we know about so far.

I’m thumbing through the results of the latest government inquiry, which was dug up by my colleagues Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, and the 44-page indictment of the Willowbrook hospital reads like a Stephen King novel.

Included are hair-raising tales of gross understaffing in critical care units, nurses ordered to lie about the condition of patients to justify ignoring them, and seriously ill patients left unattended for hours.

Twenty-year-old Oluchi McDonald, who had gangrene of the intestines, was found dead on the floor after falling, unnoticed, into a pool of his own vomit.

In a December case, a visiting family went to a nursing station to report that “something was wrong” with their relative, whose doctor had ordered continuous monitoring. Nurses went to his bedside and found that his heart monitor had flat-lined. The patient had gone into cardiopulmonary arrest, and he died within hours.

Later in the federal inquiry a nurse who was questioned said she “did not feel comfortable with the use of heart monitors.” Unfortunately, reading the machines was one of her responsibilities. Two nurses at a monitoring station couldn’t say whether a red X on the screen meant an alarm was off, or on.

If you find yourself feeling seriously ill while in the vicinity of King/Drew, I suggest you take two aspirin and ask to be airlifted to any other hospital in the United States or a nearby developing nation.

Public officials, of course, are shocked by revelations from King/Drew. They’re always shocked, but nobody else is.

We’ve all been reading King/Drew horror stories for years, and yet every new disaster is met with great surprise by Los Angeles County supervisors, who wring their hands and always promise yet another cleanup -- just as they’re doing now -- that never materializes.

“It’s criminal,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky told The Times in response to the latest horrors. “It’s just unbelievable.”

Criminal, maybe. Unbelievable, no.

I’m sure King/Drew’s got lots of dedicated and talented people. But it’s now obvious to one and all that there’s something rotten in that place. Incompetence is protected by a calcified civil service system, and a corrosive strain of racial politics has always stood in the way of a good housecleaning.

The hospital, established after the Watts riots to train African American medical professionals and serve African Americans, has had essentially the same African American administrative staff for years. As civil rights attorney Connie Rice puts it, outside input is not welcome.

“Any time it’s even suggested that they create a partnership with another hospital that might help them,” said Rice, who is African American, “they scream racism.”

So it comes as no surprise that weak-kneed politicians have never summoned the courage to take King/Drew, turn it upside down and shake out all the bad eggs.

“There’s no question there is some [racial] tension there,” said Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke.

Take the Jan. 23 rally, whose sponsors claimed that the county intended to shut down King/Drew, lock, stock and barrel. Co-sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality of California, the gathering featured fliers including a photo of a smoldering Watts and a finger-pointing Dr. King.

“Don’t let it happen!” said the flier. “It’s our hospital!”

The county has no intention of closing King/Drew, by the way, although it doesn’t strike me as a bad idea. As for it being “our” hospital, who’s “our?” The surrounding neighborhood is mostly Latino.

“We will be on top of your desk,” Rep. Maxine Waters warned county officials at the rally, referring to a plan to close King/Drew’s neonatal intensive care unit.

That unit, I should point out, was found deficient by the state. It seems to me that if you’re going to make threats, maybe you should aim them at hospital administrators instead of warning county officials to back off.

And by the way, it’s not about whether the place is run by blacks or whites or Latinos. It’s about whether you can take your child or anyone else to the hospital with a reasonable expectation that they’ll be taken care of properly, instead of ending up in the newspaper.

It was not clear to me which desk Rep. Waters intended to climb on top of, but I left a message on hers. I asked her to call back and tell me just how many people had to die before she went after the hospital, instead of defending its right to take in more victims.

Waters called back to say she’s not excusing anyone’s incompetence, and if heads have to roll, so be it. But the hospital has to be kept open because it serves people with desperate needs and few alternatives.

As for the desk-climbing threat, she said it’s county health officials she’s talking about. It’s their job to crack down on the hospital and keep supervisors informed of problems, she said, and they’ve failed.

Two nursing administrators were suspended without pay over the latest deaths, and Supervisor Burke told me she thinks the county is finally on the path to reforming King/Drew.

It sounded good.

Just like all the other times.

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday and can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com. Look for highs in the low 60s today in Santa Paula, with partly sunny skies.