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A Florida jury added $50 million in damages in a landmark medical malpractice case Thursday, bringing the facility’s total penalty to more than a quarter billion dollars.
The panel found Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg liable on all counts against it, ruling that the facility wrongfully separated Maya Kowalski from her mother — who later took her own life.
All told, the renowned medical center is now facing damages of $261 million in a case featured in the popular Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya.”
The jury awarded the Kowalski family monies for a range of offenses, including wrongfully placing the child under video surveillance for 48 consecutive hours and making her strip down to shorts and a training bra for a photograph.
A hospital staffer, they found, also committed misconduct by sometimes kissing the then 10-year-old and having her sit on her lap.
Kowalski was admitted to the hospital in October 2016 by her mother for treatment of a painful neurological condition known as Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome.
Beata Kowalski demanded that her daughter receive aggressive ketamine treatment, an approach she said had previously relieved her symptoms.
Maya’s mother said she was put in a ketamine coma in Mexico, an unconventional treatment that had improved her state.
But doctors became wary of the mother’s demands, eventually concluding that she suffered from Munchausen by proxy syndrome, where a parent manufactures or exaggerates a child’s symptoms to garner sympathy and attention.
Kowalski testified at trial that hospital personnel dismissed her condition as largely imaginary, and often scoffed at her complaints of pain.
The facility contacted Florida child welfare authorities to report suspected child abuse. After an investigation, a judge made Maya a medical ward of the state, cutting her off from her family.
Distraught over the severance and facing child abuse accusations, Beata Kowalski hung herself in the garage of her family home three months later.
Maya clutched Beata’s rosary beads and cried uncontrollably as the jury’s decision was announced in court Thursday.
The sobs intensified when the court clerk read a portion of the verdict that found the hospital liable for her mother’s death.
In a separate deliberation, the jury added $50 million in punitive damages, which are meted out to punish wrongdoing and deter similar actions.
“It was about the answer, knowing that my mom was right,” she said after the proceedings. “For the first time, I feel like I got justice.”
The panel of four women and two men arrived at their verdict on the third day of deliberations in Sarasota County,
Hospital lawyers had asserted at trial that staffers reported Beata to authorities out of good faith concern for Maya’s well-being and safety.
Her mother, they believed, was aggressively insisting on a risky treatment regime.
The defense team produced drafts of emails she wrote in her daughter’s voice for a blog.
The writings chronicled her prior ketamine treatments, with Beata writing that the infusions could potentially result in “total body failure/death.”
Both sides presented dueling experts on the condition and treatments, with some asserting that the ketamine exposures were effective, while others said the approach isn’t FDA-approved for a reason.
In closing statements this week, Kowalski family attorneys said the hospital acted out of “arrogance” and with a disdain for Beata’s divergence from their own medical expertise.
The facility, they argued, thought they could “get away with it.”
An attorney for the hospital, Howard Hunter, said they would appeal the ruling, and that the trial was marred by “clear and prejudicial errors.”
“We are determined to defend the vitally important obligation of mandatory reporters to report suspected child abuse and protect the smallest and most vulnerable among us,” he said in a statement.
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