Callers pleaded with 911 to help woman on King-Harbor floor

[Sequoia]

As Edith Isabel Rodriguez lay dying last month on the floor of the emergency room lobby at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, her boyfriend and a female bystander pleaded with 911 dispatchers for help.

Rodriguez's boyfriend, Jose Prado, had found her bleeding from her mouth and writhing in pain and tried to alert hospital staff. When he was ignored, he went to a pay phone outside the hospital and dialed 911.

"My wife is dying and the nurses don't want to help her out," he said in Spanish through an interpreter at 1:43 a.m. on May 9.

Eight minutes later, an unidentified female bystander also made an impassioned plea. "It's a lady on the ground here in the emergency room at Martin Luther King and they are overlooking her, claiming that she's been discharged," the female caller said. "And she's definitely sick and there's a guy that's ignoring her."
Within a half-hour, the 43-year-old mother of three was dead.

Subsequent investigations have shown that she writhed on the ground for 45 minutes while being ignored by hospital staff. At one point, a janitor cleaned around her. The episode was captured by the hospital's video cameras.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-king13jun13,0,941594.story?coll=la-home-center