Details of Karnamaya Mongar Death at Gosnell Clinic Revealed in Testimony

Gosnell and his staff made inadequate efforts to resuscitate Mrs. Mongar.

Sherry West told detectives that, some time after Williams had sedated Mrs. Mongar, Williams came out of the procedure room, yelling that “she needed help.” Liz Hampton testified that she was in the room next to the procedure room when Williams emerged and said that she was having a problem. Although Hampton could not remember if Gosnell was in the procedure room when Williams came out, West said that when she subsequently entered the procedure room, Gosnell was there performing what she thought was CPR on Mrs. Mongar. Eileen O’Neill eventually came in to assist Gosnell, according to West.

O’Neill testified that Lynda Williams summoned her from her second-floor office. The unlicensed “doctor” told the Grand Jury that she thought Mrs. Mongar was already dead by the time she got to the procedure room. Nevertheless, she took over administering CPR to the lifeless body because, she said, Gosnell was not doing the CPR correctly. Gosnell, meanwhile, left to retrieve the clinic’s only “crash cart” from the third floor. A crash cart is usually a set of drawers or shelves that contains the tools and drugs needed to treat a person in or near cardiac arrest.

After returning several minutes later with the medicine case, however, Gosnell did not use any of the drugs in it to try to save Mrs. Mongar’s life. O’Neill said that she tried to use the defibrillator “paddles” to revive Mrs. Mongar, but that they did not work. Still no one called 911.

Even though an overdose was immediately suspected as the cause of Mrs. Mongar’s cardiac arrest, O’Neill testified that Gosnell instructed her not to administer Narcan, a drug that could have reversed the effects of the Demerol. She said that Gosnell told her it would not work on Demerol- which is not true according to the toxicology expert who appeared before the Grand Jury. O’Neill testified that Gosnell took the time to look through the case of medicines and that he was “thrilled” to find it was up-to-date.

This is puzzling, since he seemed to have no intent of actually using the drugs to try to save Mrs. Mongar.

Gosnell and his staff attempted to cover up the cause of Mrs. Mongar’s death before paramedics arrived.

Gosnell’s odd behavior-retrieving the clinic’s case of emergency medicines from the third floor, appearing thrilled that the case supposedly was up to date, and then making no effort to use the supplies to resuscitate his patient -can only be explained as a cover-up: He simply wanted to have a “crash cart” on hand when the paramedics were finally summoned. Gosnell clearly knew it was a violation of the law-as well as of the standards of the medical profession-to sedate a patient without having resuscitation drugs and equipment ready for use.

In fact, when the ambulance was finally called, the paramedics noted that the patient had no IV access for administering life-saving drugs. Someone had evidently taken out the IV access that had been used that afternoon and evening to administer sedatives. No one told the paramedics that Mrs. Mongar had been given heavy doses of Demerol before her heart stopped. There is no other explanation than that Gosnell was trying to hide from the paramedics the cause of Mrs. Mongar’s cardiac arrest. The effect of this deception was to further delay potentially effective efforts to save the patient’s life.

It is also odd that Gosnell placed Karnamaya Mongar’s feet in the stirrups of the procedure table before the paramedics arrived. Eileen O’Neill and Ashley Baldwin both testified that they remembered clearly that the patient’s legs were dangling off the table when they saw her lifeless body before the paramedics were called. Yet, when the paramedics arrived, her feet were in the stirrups, as if she had just undergone the abortion procedure.

This action by Gosnell was, again, entirely for appearances – an effort to prevent the paramedics from noticing that the monitor was unplugged. Ashley said that Gosnell knew the machine was broken and had been for months. He had said he would get it fixed, but he never did. She said it shocked her when she tried to plug it in the night Mrs. Mongar died.

Dave Andrusko, National Right to Life