Photo: Family Photo; Family Photo/CBS
Two Chicago families have filed a lawsuit after a case of mistaken identity led one family to remove life support from a badly beaten member of the other family and then watch him die.
Relatives of Alfonso Bennett were deep into their mourning and planning his funeral when Bennett, returning from a trip out of town, walked in the door of his sister’s home in May.
The lawsuit faults the hospital and the city of Chicago, through its police department, of allegedly failing to properly identify Brittman, 69, who was found April 29 under a car on the city’s south side naked, unresponsive and with injuries to his face that made him unrecognizable, reports theChicago Tribune.
According to the lawsuit, Brittman was admitted as a John Doe to Mercy Hospital and Medical Center, where he languished for two weeks before police “incorrectly identified” him as Bennett on the basis of a mug shot, reportsNBC News.
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After the hospital reached out to Bennett’s family to say he was in the intensive care unit, his relatives showed up and told the staff it didn’t look like him, the lawsuit states.
“I said, ‘How did you all verify that this is Alfonso Bennett?,'” his sister, Rosie Brooks, told reporters at a news conference Wednesday, according to theTribune. “They said, ‘Through the Chicago Police Department.'”
When Bennett’s family continued to insist the disfigured man was not Bennett, “Rosie Brooks and her sisters were repeatedly told that he was and that they needed to accept it,” according to the lawsuit. The hospital staff told them “the situation was a difficult one to handle,” and thus they were in denial, according to the lawsuit.
“The bottom line is this mistaken identity situation is something we think could have easily been avoided,” said Cannon Lambert, the attorney representing the families, according toCBS Chicago. “It can’t happen anymore.”
Chicago police say it’s a privacy violation to fingerprint someone who hasn’t been arrested, but they have launched an investigation into the mixup, according to theTribune.
“To say that we currently have questions is an understatement,” the department said in a statement. “We have detectives looking into every aspect of this incident — from the incident response to the circumstances leading to the hospitalization and the notification of family members.”
source: people.com
