Fauquier Hospital faces $15 million lawsuit over death of Fauquier County superintendent’s son

Fauquier County Superintendent of Schools David Jeck filed a civil lawsuit Nov. 15 against Fauquier Hospital and three other defendants seeking $15 million for the “untimely, painful, and preventable” death of his 28-year-old son seven days after he was taken to Fauquier Hospital’s emergency department for sudden episodes of bloody vomiting.

David Collins Jeck, or “Lil” Dave, as his family called him in his obituary, woke up around midnight Nov. 29, 2021, with a bout of severe vomiting, after which he passed out on the bathroom floor, according to the lawsuit. There was some blood in the vomit, and Jeck was taken by ambulance to the hospital.

The care he received there caused or contributed to Jeck’s death, the lawsuit says.

At the heart of the lawsuit are allegations that Fauquier Hospital, along with the physician practices, failed to have protocols in place to ensure a gastrointestinal specialist was available to see patients in a timely manner when the hospital’s emergency department asked them to come.

The lawsuit was filed in Fauquier County Circuit Court. It seeks $10 million in damages for wrongful death by medical negligence and an additional $5 million in damages under the Survival Act, which allows the elder Jeck, as administrator of his son’s estate, to sue for his son’s personal injuries.

David Jeck is seeking $5 million for his son’s pain, suffering, mental and emotional anguish “and other injuries and damages before his untimely, painful and preventable death, which was caused by the defendants’ negligent conduct,” according to the lawsuit.

David Jeck declined to comment on the lawsuit Friday, Nov. 18.

“It’s still way too difficult to think about,” he said. “I am not going to comment on anything.”

Jeck referred calls to his attorney, Jacqueline T. Colclough, of Regan Zambri Long, a Washington, D.C., law firm that specializes in personal injury and medical malpractice. She did not immediately respond to the Fauquier Times’ request for comment.

The other three defendants named in the lawsuit are Advanced Digestive Care LLC, Gastroenterology Associates and Dr. Tinatin K. O’Connell, who is with Gastroenterology Associates. The lawsuit alleges that physician practices, along with the hospital, failed to provide adequate call coverage.

O’Connell allegedly failed to respond in a “timely” way to repeated requests to evaluate the younger Jeck’s condition and then failed to treat him with the same level of skill and diligence as other gastrointestinal specialists across the commonwealth, the lawsuit says.

Physicians typically agree to respond to calls from the emergency department within a set timeframe, either in person or by phone.

Gastroenterology Associates declined to comment. Neither Advanced Digestive Care LLC nor O’Connell could be reached before press time. No court dates have been set.

Timeline

The lawsuit alleges that the younger Jeck may not have died if the gastroenterologist who was supposed to be on call at Fauquier Hospital that day hadn’t taken hours to respond to the hospital’s repeated requests for help.

The physician who first saw David Collins Jeck in the Fauquier Hospital emergency department said the patient was a “healthy-appearing male in no distress” but the doctor asked for a consult from a GI specialist because of the bloody vomiting and loss of consciousness he suffered at home, the lawsuit says.

The exact time the ED doctor made that request is not clear in the lawsuit, but the nursing staff noted at 6:39 a.m. that they were “awaiting (the GI) consultant.” The doctor they were waiting for was O’Connell, according to the lawsuit.

At some point over the next few hours, the doctor who took over David Collins Jeck’s case in the emergency department saw changes in his patient’s bloodwork that might signal new bleeding in his stomach. In addition, his heart rate was abnormally high, the lawsuit said.

The doctor began to worry that blood products might need to be administered to counteract blood loss and that the patient might need an endoscopy, the lawsuit says. Endoscopy is a procedure that would allow doctors to see into the digestive system via a tiny camera.

The doctor also kept trying to reach O’Connell. “In the hours that followed, Defendant Dr. O’Connell did not come to the bedside to examine Mr. Jeck despite many attempts to contact her,” the lawsuit says.

Hospital staff, including the emergency medicine doctor assigned to the younger Jeck, tried many ways of reaching out to O’Connell, the lawsuit says. Those included multiple overhead pages to the GI service and calls to the GI service’s office. In addition, the GI service’s office staff and the emergency medicine doctor sent text messages to O’Connell’s personal cell phone, the lawsuit says.

The ED doctor also called O’Connell’s personal cell phone, which went unanswered and then redirected to the GI hospitalist number, which also went unanswered. The ED doctor also called the hospital’s nursing supervisor and the GI outpatient procedure nursing unit, the lawsuit says.

By 12:45 p.m., O’Connell still had not arrived, and the younger Jeck took a turn for the worse. He was pale, agitated, sweating heavily and had abnormally low blood pressure. He began to vomit bright red blood, according to the lawsuit.

At about 1 p.m., the emergency department doctor got O’Connell on the phone “while Defendant Dr. O’Connell remained off-campus, apparently at another hospital,” the lawsuit says.

The ED doctor told her about the younger Jeck’s worsening symptoms and the need to administer blood products because he was vomiting fresh blood. The ED doctor and O’Connell agreed he needed an emergency endoscopy. The emergency room doctor prepared for O’Connell to arrive and perform the procedure, the lawsuit says.

At about 1:40 p.m., O’Connell arrived at Fauquier Hospital, where she noted that the younger Jeck was awake and alert, the lawsuit says. She noted the possible causes of the bloody vomit, including a bleeding ulcer. She ordered an emergency endoscopy at the bedside, according to the lawsuit.

At 2 p.m., O’Connell performed the endoscopy, more than nine hours after Jeck arrived in the emergency department, the lawsuit says. She ultimately was unable to find the source of the bleeding “due to persistent pooling of blood,” the lawsuit says.

According to the lawsuit, at about 4:10 p.m., a doctor in the Interventional Radiology department performed a procedure called embolization to try to block arteries that could be causing the bleeding. The doctor noted the procedure was needed because of “acute life-threatening upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage in the setting of hemorrhagic shock” with “copious amounts of blood in the stomach, with rapid bleeding preventing visualization of the source,” the lawsuit says.

For the rest of the night, doctors tried several methods to treat the younger Jeck’s spiraling condition, according to the lawsuit. He was admitted to the intensive care unit, sedated and hooked up to a ventilator to breathe for him, the lawsuit says.

Doctors agreed the younger Jeck should be transported urgently to another hospital that could provide highly specialized care for trauma and chest surgery. Nevertheless, he remained at Fauquier Hospital for hours because of his fragile condition “and/or reported unavailability of beds,” at hospitals equipped to handle higher-acuity patients, the lawsuit said.

By 12:30 p.m. Nov. 30, 2021, O’Connell evaluated Jeck at his bedside, noting, among other details, that although they younger Jeck no longer was bleeding, he had suffered significant organ damage after 24 hours at Fauquier Hospital, the lawsuit said.

At 5:31 p.m., the younger Jeck was taken to Inova Fairfax Hospital in a 17-minute medical flight. In the days that followed, he became even sicker. Doctors there said he had suffered brain damage, the lawsuit said.

In the early morning hours of Dec. 6, 2021, the Jeck family was informed that David Collins Jeck would not survive, and his family chose comfort measures for him, the lawsuit said. Comfort measures generally mean decreasing the intensity of medical treatment.

At 7:15 a.m. Dec. 6, 2021, David Collins Jeck was pronounced dead.

Reach Colleen LaMay at clamay@fauquier.com.