ST. CROIX — When 41-year-old Samuel Ruiz Jr. arrived at the hospital via ambulance on the afternoon of January 2, he was not immediately treated and disappeared from the waiting room when called for service about five and a half hours later.
A nurse walking the fence line at Governor Juan F. Luis Hospital and Medical Center that leads to neighboring condos discovered his lifeless body the next morning behind the generator room, according to police.
Krystal Ruiz, the man’s sister, attempted to retrieve his medical records but the hospital denied her request. She has since filed a lawsuit to subpoena those records in search for answers to his mysterious death.
“Normally, when someone is treated at the hospital and they pass, then their relative, the personal representative, can get a copy of the medical records,” attorney Lee Rohn, who represents Krystal Ruiz, said. “But in this particular case, when she went to get her brother’s medical records with proof that he’s her brother, they refused to give them to her.”
The goal of the complaint is to obtain the records to determine if the hospital’s actions or inactions constituted a breach of the standard of care, potentially leading to further legal action, Rohn said.
“There’s a mechanism where you can file an investigative complaint in order to get subpoenas to make people who won’t turn over the documents to you turn them over to you,” she said.
Rohn said she filed an investigative complaint, noting she served the hospital with a subpoena to turn over the documents.
“Once we get the documents, then we can amend this existing suit to name the hospital and specifically what they have done wrong that caused his failure to get treatment when we find out what the records show,” she said.
The next step would be to analyze the records to establish the hospital’s liability.
“I can find out when he got there and find out if and when he ever got any treatment and why he was allowed to leave the emergency room and not be kept an eye on to see what was going on with him,” Rohn said.
Rohn said it is protocol for emergency rooms to triage patients to determine the level of treatment necessary, generally providing care within an hour. She said, however, that timeline is not true at JFL.
Aniah John, JFL spokesperson, said patients who arrive at the emergency room are assigned levels of acuity to determine how quickly they will be treated, declining to provide specific details about Samuel Ruiz Jr.’s case because it is under an internal investigation. She was unable to answer why he was left in the waiting room for hours before being called for service.
“That’s something that I won’t be able to comment on specifically,” she said.
Samuel Ruiz Jr. arrived at the hospital via ambulance and was registered at 12:32 p.m. on January 2, according to the Virgin Islands Police Department. He was no longer in the waiting room when called for service after 6 p.m. The 911 Emergency Call Center was notified and reported a deceased individual at the hospital’s fence line at 7:28 a.m. on January 3. The responding doctor on scene declared him deceased at 7:30 a.m.
