Getting a call from 911 took five hours in the death of the teenager who had surgery on her face,
Documents give more information about what happened to a 19-year-old who died during a breast augmentation surgery, and they show how the surgery went wrong.
In the death of Emmalyn Nguyen, who went into a coma on Aug. 1, 2019, and died 14 months later in October 2020, Dr. Geoffrey Kim and nurse anesthetist Rex Meeker are facing criminal charges.
In court documents, doctors’ notes show that Nguyen was given local anesthesia at 2pm, then CPR when she wasn’t breathing for 15 minutes. It then shows that there was a five-and-a-half-hour wait before a 911 call at 7:35pm.
Records show that an investigator asked a doctor who was an expert about when he would call 911 after he had a heart attack. The expert said, “It should be done right away.” People at a surgical center like that don’t have back-up and there are no resources to help, so “it’s immediate.”
After Kim stopped breathing, she went into the waiting room hours later and told her mother everything was fine. It took longer than expected for her to wake up.
In documents, it says that Kim is charged with first-degree assault and criminally negligent homicide because an investigator found that he showed “extreme indifference to the value of human life.” This is because:
- refusing to call 911 after giving CPR to his staff.
- not giving Nguyen’s mother the correct information, which would have led her to seek more advanced medical care for her daughter had she known about the situation.
- not realizing that Nguyen had a traumatic brain injury and not getting immediate advanced medical care
- giving emergency medical workers the wrong information about when Nguyen had her heart attack
- and giving the wrong information to an emergency room doctor on two separate occasions, which led to even more neglect in Nguyen’s care, as well.
Records say nurse anesthetist Rex Meeker is charged with manslaughter for “recklessly causing the death of Nguyen from similar allegations.” Meeker is also accused of failing to properly observe Nguyen after giving her anesthesia and failing to notice that she wasn’t breathing for 15 minutes.
