14-year-old Cobb County girl died in mental hospital

June 18, 2007
By Alan Judd and Andy Miller

State officials have agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle the case of a 14-year-old Cobb County girl whose death became a touchstone for serious problems in Georgia's state psychiatric hospitals.

Sarah Elizabeth Crider's family will be paid $1 million for her wrongful death and her estate will be paid $250,000, according to lawyers for the family and the state. The payment apparently represents the largest compensation in at least a decade for family members of patients who died in one of the state's seven mental hospitals.

"The state took responsibility for the death of Sarah Crider," said Alwyn Fredericks, the lawyer for the girl's family. "They did not choose to drag the family through additional, protracted litigation. We still think it was a tragedy, but [state officials] did the right thing."

Crider, a seventh-grader at Lost Mountain Middle School, died Feb. 13, 2006, at Georgia Regional Hospital/Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution featured her death in the opening article of a series, "A Hidden Shame," that reported at least 115 state hospital patients died under suspicious circumstances from 2002 through 2006.

Crider died from a severe intestinal blockage that had gone undetected by doctors and nurses, records show. On the night she died, she vomited several times, but a doctor called to her bedside apparently chose not to perform a physical examination. Hospital workers who were supposed to check on her condition through the night failed to enter her room for as much as four hours. They discovered her body early the next morning.

After Crider's death, hospital officials mandated that employees monitor patients' bowel movements. But less than a year later, the Journal-Constitution reported in April, another patient at Georgia Regional, 59-year-old Michael Ernest Webb, died after he went 19 days without a bowel movement, and employees failed to intervene.

Articles on Crider's death and other cases prompted the U.S. Justice Department to open an investigation into whether the state hospitals are violating patients' civil rights. Similar investigations in other states have led to sweeping changes in the delivery of mental health care.

The General Assembly voted in April to create a commission to study ways to transform the state's mental health system. Gov. Sonny Perdue vetoed a resolution creating the commission, saying he would issue an executive order forming a similar panel that, unlike the legislative group, would include officials from the executive branch, which oversees the hospitals.

Crider's family — including her mother and father, her two grandmothers and two siblings — notified the state this spring that it intended to file a lawsuit over her death.

Lawyers from the state attorney general's office agreed to settle the Crider case out of court after a mediation session on June 4, said Fredericks, of the Cash, Krugler & Fredericks law firm. State law caps wrongful-death settlements from state agencies at $2 million.

Before the Crider case, the largest settlement this decade stemming from a death in a state hospital was the $850,000 paid to the family of Rickey Dean Wingo. The 53-year-old Rome man died in 2002 after employees at Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital choked and beat him during an altercation.

Officials at the Department of Human Resources, which runs the hospitals, did not comment Monday on the Crider settlement. As part of the settlement, the agency acknowledged no wrongdoing by its employees. The department fired Crider's primary physician at Georgia Regional, but only "counseled" the doctor who did not examine her the night she died.

In an interview last November, however, the department's top officials described Crider's death as a systemic breakdown.

"Our take on it was the situation with the child was not something that occurred on one night or one shift," said Gwen Skinner, director of the department's mental health division. "I would say that any time you have a child die, the system has failed."

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