State agrees to play $1.25 million in mental hospital death

<p>The state has agreed to pay $1.25 million to the family and estate of a 14-year-old who died last year in a Georgia mental hospital.</p><p>The family of Sarah Elizabeth Crider of Cobb County will be paid $1 million for her wrongful death and her estate will be paid $250,000, according to lawyers for both sides.</p><p>The seventh-grader died Feb. 13, 2006 at Georgia Regional Hospital/Atlanta from a severe intestinal blockage.</p><p>Records showed that 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 up to four hours. They discovered her body early the next morning.</p><p>The girl's death was featured in a series of articles in The Atlanta Journal-Constitituion that reported at least 115 state hospital patients died under suspicious circumstances from 2002 through 2006.</p><p>Hospital officials since mandated that employees monitor patients' bowel movements. But less than a year later, the Journal-Constitution reported in April, another patient at Georgia Regional died after 19 days without a bowel movement.</p><p>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 Alwyn Fredericks, the family's lawyer. State law caps wrongful-death settlements from state agencies at $2 million.</p><p>The previous largest settlement this decade in a death in a state hospital was $850,000, paid to the family of Rickey Dean Wingo, a 53-year-old Rome man who died in 2002 after employees at Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital choked and beat him during an altercation.</p><p>Officials at the Department of Human Resources, which runs the state's seven mental hospitals, did not comment Monday on the Crider settlement. As part of the settlement, the agency acknowledged no wrongdoing by its employees.</p><p>___</p><p>HASH(0x2de9f3c)</p>