Pleas for Help Ignored: Woman Dies on Floor of E.R.

According to the L.A. Times, Edith Isabel Rodriguez lay dying on the Emergency Room floor of Martin Luther King Jr. Harbor Hospital, while hospital staff did nothing to assist her.

As the woman's boyfriend pleaded with those around her for help the mother of three and grandmother of four, she bled all over the E.R. floor from what a Country Coroner found was a perforated bowel.

Nearby a janitor for the hospital mopped up the woman's blood. After Mrs. Rodriguez had made three visits to King-Harbor Hospital for her severe pain, she lay down on a bench outside the hospital. Finding her condition deteriorating, her boyfriend escorted her back inside where Rodriguez collapsed. Through an interpretor, the woman's boyfriend called 911 and pleaded with no avail to police dispatchers. He was told that there was nothing they could do to assist him as he was already at a hospital.

During the days prior to the death of Edith Rodriguez, the couple had sought relief for her pain at the hospital receiving only prescription pain medications and being told that she could go home.

During the evening of her death, her pain increased to the point that she returned once again to the E.R. The woman who collapsed on the floor in agony began spitting up blood. In the news article from the L.A. Times, Jose Prada pleaded with dispatchers on a pay phone located outside the emergency room saying, "My wife is dying and the nurses don't want to help her out." Prada's tone grew more and more desperate as he watched her deteriorate. The L. A. Sheriff's Dept. dispatcher struggled to make sense of the call and urged him to instead contact the doctors and nurses at the hospital, as they were already there.

Eight minutes later an unidentified woman, apparently another patient, placed another call to 911. She pleaded with dispatchers for 2 and 1/2 minutes while being repeatedly interrupted and admonished for making unnecessary calls to 911.