The household of a severely diabetic man whom authorities stated died by the hands of a nurse overseeing his care final 12 months has filed a wrongful loss of life swimsuit in opposition to the ability the place he lived, alleging it allowed the nurse to berate and bully him, and in the end trigger his loss of life.
Former nursing house nurse Heather Pressdee has already been charged with administering extreme doses of insulin to sufferers — 17 of whom died.
In whole, she allegedly mistreated 22 sufferers — some diabetic and others not — with the damaging doses she administered at 5 totally different care services from 2020 to this 12 months, in response to the Pennsylvania Lawyer Basic’s Workplace.
Now, a brand new lawsuit has been filed in opposition to a kind of services, Sunnyview Nursing and Rehabilitation Middle in Butler County, Pennsylvania, the place Nicholas Cymbol died Might 1, 2023.
The swimsuit — filed Wednesday in Butler County, the household’s lawyer Rob Peirce stated — alleges the middle and its operator had been negligent, failed to coach workers to acknowledge and report abuse, and didn’t take away Pressdee from Cymbol’s care though she had bullied him and referred to as him a derogatory time period.
Sunnyview Nursing and Rehabilitation Middle didn’t instantly reply Friday to a request for remark.
Cymbol’s loss of life
Cymbol, 43, was a resident at Sunnyview. He was a “brittle diabetic,” which means he usually skilled massive swings in his blood glucose ranges, he had an anoxic mind damage, blindness and neuropathy and thus required around-the-clock care, the grievance stated.
Pressdee, who was employed in January 2023, was the supervisor of the unit the place Cymbol lived.
In that function, she was liable for offering direct care to residents, addressing resident care issues and conducting inner investigations into workers complaints or abuse.
The grievance alleged Pressdee “routinely insulted, berated, bullied and abused Mr. Cymbol, simply as she had accomplished to different residents.”
Workers allegedly knew she “disliked” Cymbol, and he or she routinely referred to as him derogatory phrases in reference to his mind damage inside earshot of different Sunnyview workers, the submitting stated.
On a number of events, she allegedly prevented different nurses from feeding or giving water to Cymbol, and had him eat alone when he was taken to the communal eating room.
Pressdee had already been linked to different suspicious resident deaths when she was caring for him, the grievance stated.
One one event, she informed different workers members Cymbol was “going to be the subsequent one to die anyway,” the grievance stated.
Regardless of these crimson flags, the ability didn’t take away Pressdee from his care, the grievance stated.
On April 30, 2023, Cymbol’s nurse recorded his blood sugar stage at 167 mg/dL at 6:30 a.m. Simply half-hour later, at 7 a.m., Pressdee documented his blood sugar had allegedly risen to 380 mg/dL.
Pressdee then injected Cymbol with 60 items of insulin, and his blood sugar plummeted. She then tried to reverse the drop by administering a number of doses of glucagon, the submitting stated.
The swimsuit stated she initially refused to name 911, however paramedics had been ultimately referred to as after she was confronted by different staffers.
Cymbol was taken to Butler Memorial Hospital for hypoglycemia — a situation wherein one’s blood sugar stage is decrease than the usual vary — and was discharged and returned to Sunnyview that very same night.
Regardless of having been hospitalized, Sunnyview nursing workers allegedly failed to observe his blood sugar and situation.
That night into the morning of Might 1, his situation “regularly declined,” the grievance stated.
Shortly after 4 a.m. on Might 1, a nurse at Sunnyview who was not Pressdee discovered him in a “hypoglycemic disaster and foaming on the mouth.”
Cymbol’s sister, Melinda Brown, was referred to as and informed to come back to the ability. At 4:30 a.m. she obtained a name from a nurse saying Cymbol had died.
His explanation for loss of life was initially recognized as myocardial infarction.
At first, Cymbol’s household believed he died of pure causes, the swimsuit stated, however it wasn’t till an investigation by the Pennsylvania Workplace of the Lawyer Basic that they in the end realized Pressdee had administered an extreme and deadly dose of insulin to Cymbol, leading to his loss of life.
The day Cymbol died, Pressdee was terminated by Sunnyview for exhibiting abusive habits towards residents and workers, in response to the grievance.
After Cymbol’s loss of life, she despatched a sympathy card to his household saying, “nick was certainly one of a sort,” in response to the swimsuit.
Failures at Sunnyview
The swimsuit stated the middle failed in even hiring Pressdee given her checkered profession historical past, wherein she labored at 10 medical services from 2018 to December 2022 and was pressured to resign or was terminated from every of these jobs resulting from “abusive tendencies and habits towards residents and workers.”
Whereas at Sunnyview, she allegedly exhibited “troubling and erratic habits,” however the facility “persistently failed” to coach workers to acknowledge and report the abuse or neglect of residents. In consequence, her abuse was allowed to “pervade all through the ability,” the grievance stated.
The swimsuit stated members of the Sunnyview nursing workers started to note residents whom Pressdee had entry to “had been passing away unexpectedly and/or below suspicious circumstances, inflicting the nursing workers to imagine Pressdee had involvement of their deaths.”
The swimsuit outlined a few of these different suspicious resident deaths.
However the middle “fully and repeatedly ignored the issues of workers and residents pertaining to Pressdee’s therapy of residents.”
Pressdee’s arrest and prices
Weeks after Cymbol’s loss of life and Pressdee’s subsequent termination, the Pennsylvania Division of Well being carried out an investigation of the ability, in response to the grievance.
Sunnyview Working LLC and the middle terminated or reprimanded workers who supplied data to the division relating to resident deaths or Pressdee’s conduct, the grievance stated.
On Might 24, 2023, an arrest warrant was issued and he or she was taken into custody in reference to two resident deaths from insulin-induced hypoglycemia at High quality Life Providers–Chicora, the lawsuit stated.
She admitted to injecting these residents with the intention of killing them and he or she was subsequently charged with two counts of legal murder, counts later upgraded to homicide within the first and third diploma, the grievance stated.
Then, in November, she was charged with 17 further counts of tried murder and 19 counts of neglect of care-dependent individuals for deaths at services in Butler, Allegheny, Westmoreland and Armstrong counties.
In Cymbol’s case, she was charged with homicide and legal neglect.
The legal investigation into Pressdee is ongoing.
The November lawyer normal’s workplace information launch asserting the extra prices doesn’t notice prices filed in opposition to Sunnyview.
Attorneys representing Pressdee within the legal case, Phil DiLucente and Jim DePasquale, stated they aren’t concerned with the civil lawsuits however added that it’s attainable the previous nurse “pleads responsible to every little thing she is charged with” and {that a} standing listening to has been set for Might.
If she pleads responsible, “the one challenge turns into whether or not she was negligently employed and or negligently supervised and what the damages are,” the attorneys stated.
The brand new swimsuit, filed by Brown, Cymbol’s sister, in addition to the administrator of his property, seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and calls for a jury trial.
“We had been employed by the households of Heather Pressdee’s victims to get solutions as to how she was permitted to proceed working in these services, regardless of her erratic, disturbing, and abusive habits,” Peirce, an lawyer representing Brown, stated in an announcement Wednesday. “The extra our workplace has investigated, the extra questions now we have as to why these services allowed these tragedies to happen.”