When Edith Isabel Rodriguez showed up in the emergency room of an inner-city hospital complaining of severe stomach pain, the staff were familiar with her.
It was at least her third visit to Los Angeles County's public Martin Luther King Junior-Harbor Hospital in as many days.
"You have already been seen, and there is nothing we can do," a nurse told her.
Minutes later, the 43-year-old mother of three collapsed on the floor screaming in pain and began vomiting blood. Employees ignored her, and soon she was dead.
Now state and federal regulators are threatening to close the hospital or pull its funding unless it can be improved, and Rodriguez has become a symbol of everything wrong with the facility derisively known as "Killer King."
After she collapsed, surveillance cameras show that Rodriguez was left on the floor.
Nurses walked past her. A janitor cleaned up around her. No one did anything until police were called to take her away. They did not get far before she went into cardiac arrest and died.
"This needs to stop," state Health Services Director Sandra Shewry said Thursday as the agency moved to revoke the hospital's license.
The hospital, formerly known as Martin Luther King Junior-Drew Medical Center, was built after the 1965 Watts riot to bring health care to poor, minority communities in south Los Angeles.
Autopsy results revealed that Rodriquez died of a perforated bowel that probably developed in the previous 24 hours, a condition that is often treatable if caught early enough.
After Rodriguez's death, federal reports showed that a multimillion-dollar rescue effort to correct the problem was failing and patients were in "immediate jeopardy." Of the 60 cases reviewed between February and June, more than a quarter received substandard care, according to the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The findings have sent county officials scrambling to improve care before a federal inspection due by Aug. 15 that could determine whether the hospital keeps its federal funding. The county might close the facility without that money.
On Friday, the county's Department of Health Services released a contingency plan to deal with the closing of hospital departments and relocating current patients if necessary.
The plan, which also lays out how the hospital could eventually be re-opened if a private partner is found, will be presented to the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, said Bruce Chernof, director of the department.
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