Black Box Report

This tragedy ought to make every one of us sick and mad for two very different reasons. First, of course, is the impossible contradiction of the promise of our hospitals to save and care for their patients versus the video of staffers treating Esmin Green as road kill to be ignored in dying and death. Area residents may have been shocked by the video, but few were truly surprised.

Kings County Hospital, and others like it, are America’s dirty little secret. They’re where we send our poor and mentally ill to get whatever care they can get, out of sight, out of mind. The only reason the case is now on our radar is because the video became public. But don't kid yourself; this wasn't one bad day at the hospital, this was just one caught on camera.

About a year ago, a state agency filed a lawsuit calling the psychiatric center at Kings County Hospital "a chamber of filth, decay indifference and danger...Patients are subjected to overcrowded and squalid conditions often accompanied by physical abuse and unnecessary and punitive injections of mind altering drugs...From the moment a person steps through the doors, she is stripped of her freedom and dignity and literally forced to fight for the essentials of life."

The suit said the hospital's emergency ward was the worst of the worst; patients marooned for days, literally forced to sit on the floor, bathrooms filthy and fly ridden, and that patients with the temerity to complain too loudly are sometimes handcuffed, beaten or injected with psychotropic drugs.

We should all be outraged and we should all demand change; but there is the other part of this story that is part of a bigger problem with our society. Esmin Green writhed in pain and died in front of staffers, security guards and patients and nobody lifted a finger.

A month ago in Hartford, CT, Angel Torres was struck in broad daylight on a crowded street. As the 78 year-old lay motionless on the road, the hit and run sped off and passerbys and motorists just looked on. Angel Torres will be on a ventilator for the rest of his life.

Last year a 43 year-old woman writhed on a L.A. County Hospital floor; again, no one could be bothered to lift a finger. When her boyfriend begged the police for help, he was arrested for a parole violation.

It is said we should be judged as a society by how we treat the least among us. If that's the standard, I suggest we are in deep trouble.