3 former employees of DC psychiatric hospital indicted in death of patient
Three employees of the Psychiatric Institute of Washington have been indicted on charges related to the death of a patient, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro said Wednesday.
At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Pirro said the three employees — Nelson Kuma, 37, Richard Hounnou, 45, and Norma Munoz-Bent, 68, all residents of Maryland — are charged with one count of criminally negligent homicide and face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Kuma and Hounnou work as psychiatric counselors and Munoz-Bent is a registered nurse.
All three employees pleaded not guilty and were released Tuesday pending trial, according to a news release from Pirro’s office. Pirro said her office will be filing a notice of appeal regarding their release.
In April 2020, the patient, referred to as “GW,” was a 58-year-old man who had been admitted to the Tenleytown facility for two days. He had previously had an “emergency event,” Pirro said, and had to be resuscitated.
Because of his health status, GW was meant to receive one-to-one care, where a health care professional was supposed to check on him every 15 minutes and enter information into a record.
According to video taken inside the hospital, the man can be seen lying nude on a mattress on the floor and having labored breathing.
Pirro said a psych tech enters the room, takes note of the man’s labored breathing but does nothing to help “for four minutes. He walks around, does nothing. A second tech enters the room, they fist bump each other, and for seven minutes, they have a very animated conversation.”
Then, a nurse enters the room, “stares at him” but does nothing to help. She returns with a blood pressure cuff but puts it on his forearm, not above his elbow.
“Here’s the bottom line, this trio did nothing to help this patient,” Pirro said. “They finally turned the man over at 12:56, and they gave him a chest compression, 21 minutes later.”
By the time they attempted the life-saving measures, he’d died.
Pirro said the health care employees “violated the most basic standard of medical care.”
“I also want to be clear this was not a close call. This was not a difficult medical judgment. This was basic, entry-level incompetence. This was completely abandoning the health of a human being. They had a legal and an ethical duty to act, and they chose not to,” she said.
The three employees will return to court May 29.