The Holt City Gazette had put the past several years of archives on their website, but John knew that the era he needed to revisit was going to send him to microfilm. He started spending his days—between tending to Larry and around his grant projects—at the library, piecing together the story.
Vicky’s medical charts gave him a timeline to follow. He started with the date of her death and scrolled his way to the next day’s Gazette, which included her starkly worded obituary: Randall and Holly Farragut’s nine-year-old daughter Victoria Denise died at Holt Memorial, where she was admitted after several days of illness. Cause of death was undetermined. Vicky left behind five brothers and sisters. Mr. Farragut, the obit noted dryly, managed the Amoco station on East Becker Road. Funeral arrangements were unknown.
The date of the subpoena and the log of record requests as the files shuttled between lawyers’ offices told John when the lawsuit was filed. The June 26 edition of the newspaper broke the news about the suit filed against Holt Memorial and Dr. Lawrence Husted.
The paper gave the story only two column inches on page three. John instinctively deduced that the paper favored the hospital and the highly regarded Dr. Husted over the lowly Farraguts, whose perpetual flaunting of the law and decent behavior was a staple of the paper’s coverage. As John scrolled through day after day of old issues of the Gazette, he was bemused to observe how often a Farragut was caught driving drunk or selling dope or irking neighbors by dismantling junked cars on their front lawn at two in the morning.
John leaned into the eye-straining glow of the projector screen and tried to glean what he could from the short article about the lawsuit.
Vicky’s parents brought her to the emergency room after days of either ignoring the fact that she ran a fever and had pains in her abdomen, or believing they could treat it themselves. When they finally brought her in the diagnosis was an appendix about to burst, but the claim stated that what should have been a routine procedure unexpectedly led to internal bleeding that killed her. The suit charged that Lawrence Husted, the attending physician at the time, was negligent in his treatment of the girl.
The paper reported that a lawyer named Henry Getch represented the Farraguts and was going after Larry and the hospital for $1.7 million. He pictured Randy Farragut salivating at such a sum in exchange for his daughter’s life and knew he’d find that to be more than a fair trade. It was a tragedy and all, but he still had plenty of little Farraguts left over.
* * *
John was able to retrieve trial transcripts from the county archives. It all boiled down to the internal bleeding that killed the girl. As the ER physician on call when Vicky was brought in, Larry immediately diagnosed the inflamed appendix and removed it. He was concerned about low blood pressure that didn’t right itself after the surgery, so he prescribed a blood thinner to flush the catheter and prevent clots. This was within accepted practice, but not a routine procedure for such a young patient.
The problem was that Larry failed to note in her admission records that for the four days in which her parents tried to treat her fever and stomach pains on their own, they gave her an outrageous amount of aspirin. This thinned her blood to a dangerous degree, which became lethal when Larry unknowingly compounded it. The little girl immediately began to bleed out and while Larry apparently struggled valiantly to save her, there was nothing he could do.
John squirmed at feeling pretty certain that his father fucked up. The nurses ask you all those questions at admission for a reason. The doctors need to know what they’re dealing with. Larry’s lawyer tried to divert blame—the admitting nurse should have alerted Larry, she should have pressed the parents for more specifics about the aspirin consumption instead of merely noting “high vol. asp.”—but Getch, the Farragut’s lawyer, insisted that it was ultimately Larry’s responsibility to know the facts.
Henry Getch, in his late twenties at the time and probably no more than an ambulance-chasing gnat to a well-connected and prosperous attorney like Bob Schurmer, apparently scored blows Larry’s lawyer had not anticipated. So after spending several days calling doctors and patients to publicly testify on behalf of Larry’s medical skills, Schurmer turned his sights on the Farraguts.
The Gazette articles now deemed the story deserving of front-page attention as Bob Schurmer turned the trial into an indictment of Randy and Holly Farragut. The jury was all locals; they knew the Farraguts. And Schurmer didn’t miss a thing: Randy’s dope arrests in high school and, with greater and greater frequency after he returned from Vietnam. Holly’s long list of petty offenses, like shoplifting, public intoxication, and fighting. And an endless string of police calls to the family’s home, usually for noise or some boorish fracas, but often enough with concerns about the well-being of their children. Neighbors reported often finding little Farraguts straying into their yards in filthy clothes and helping themselves to fruit from their trees, seemingly unfed.
Henry Getch finally got the judge to rule the attacks on the parents irrelevant and out-of-bounds, but Schurmer got enough read into the record to set him up for the kill. He called Randy Farragut to the stand.
Schurmer focused on the four days leading up to finally bringing Vicky to the emergency room. How could the parents have allowed their daughter to writhe in pain for four days before getting her help? How could they have ignored a fever that spiked at 102? How could they not know that handfuls of aspirin for days were the worst thing to give a kid suffering from stomach pains?
Were they just ignorant, or was there some other reason they needed to keep their daughter out of the hospital? As John read he could almost feel the ice water in the lawyer’s veins as he let go with the kill shot.
“Was it true,” he began dryly, reading from a document, “that at the time that your daughter took sick, there was a civil action against you, ordering you to pay Kingston Auto twelve hundred dollars for car repairs you hadn’t paid for? And that if you had taken your daughter to the emergency room, you risked having that order enforced if the police were brought in?”
“She was my kid, goddammit!” Randy said forcefully. “I wouldn’t see her hurt for twelve hundred bucks!”
“But,” the lawyer slinked, “if you and your wife could cure her yourself, with your aspirin, twelve hundred bucks could buy a lot of beer and cigarettes.”
Randy’s lawyer objected.
“No further questions,” Larry’s lawyer said as he took his seat.
The jury deliberated for almost three full days but when they came back, they cleared Larry and the hospital of all charges. The picture on the front page of the Gazette showed that after the verdict was read, Randy and Holly Farragut held each other and cried.
Larry Husted was in the background of the photo shaking his smiling lawyer’s hand. Larry’s back was to the camera, leaving John to imagine the emotions on his father’s face.