MARTIN COUNTY — When Martin Memorial Medical Center hired a jet in 2003 to repatriate a brain-damaged patient to his native Guatemala, hospital officials “never took the law into their own hands,” according to documents filed ahead of a June 23 trial.

“They never stuffed Mr. (Luis Alberto) Jimenez in the back of a van under the cover of darkness and drove him out of town,” Martin Memorial attorney Scott Michaud stated in papers detailing Jimenez’s predawn flight to Guatemala City on July 10, 2003.

“When Martin Memorial discharged Jimenez to the facility in Guatemala,” Michaud noted, “Martin Memorial did so with the honest belief based on the evidence it uncovered, that the hospital in Guatemala was properly equipped to care for him.”

That may be a key issue for a jury during a false imprisonment trial with accusations that Martin Memorial kidnapped a wheelchair-bound Jimenez and forced his return to Guatemala against his will, and against the direction of his legal guardian and cousin by marriage, Montejo Gaspar Montejo of Indiantown.

Jimenez, then 31, lived at the hospital for two years after suffering severe brain damage in a 2000 car collision. Treating the undocumented alien cost the hospital nearly $2 million, officials said.

Michaud defended the hospital’s actions in papers seeking to stop Jimenez’s lawyers from trying to collect punitive damages, generally awarded to punish an offending party.

Last year, a judge ruled Jimenez’s attorneys could argue that punitive damages were warranted after they claimed the hospital acted with “malice and reckless disregard” for Jimenez’s safety when it took him by ambulance to an awaiting jet and flew him out of the country.

According to published reports, Jimenez was released from a rehabilitation facility in Guatemala soon after he arrived. He receives little medical care while living with his mother in Soloma Huehuetenango, Guatemala. He is not expected to return for the trial.

Martin Memorial deported Jimenez after being granted a court order by Circuit Judge John Fennelly, which an appeals court later determined exceeded the trial court’s jurisdiction.

That court order was scrutinized with hospital executives during depositions taken by Jimenez’s attorney Jack Scarola, of West Palm Beach.

In his deposition, Robert Lord, the hospital’s chief legal officer, said they believed steps they took to discharge Jimenez were “legally appropriate.”

“This was not, in our view, a deportation case,” Lord said. “This was a guardianship case. It was about what was best for Mr. Jimenez.”

While deposing Richmond “Dick” Harman, former CEO of Martin Memorial, Scarola suggested the hospital took advantage of a narrow window of time between a favorable court ruling and an expected appeal when it chose July 10 to deport Jimenez.

The opportunity came after Fennelly ruled he would not reconsider the case, leaving in place his June 27, 2003, order that Jimenez should be sent to a rehabilitation center in Guatemala. Attorneys for Jimenez had planned to appeal that decision to the 4th District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach. But by the time an appeal was filed following Fennelly’s final ruling, Jimenez was gone.

Harman though, said they returned Jimenez during a predawn flight because the Guatemala facility only accepted new patients early in the day.

“You would not have wanted to sneak Mr. Jimenez out of the hospital in order to beat the deadline established by the court to decide Mr. Jimenez’s legal rights, would you?” Scarola pressed.

“No,” Harman said. “My interest here was first to accomplish a transfer to an appropriate level of care for Mr. Jimenez.”

By Melissa E. Holsman

Tags: appeals, beach, beat, beating, best, brain, car, ceo, chief, court, grants, hand, hospital, Indiantown, judge, jury, medical, mother, offender, safety, trial, warrant

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under Courts, Martin County. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.