Girl Injured in Swimming Pool Mishap Undergoes Triple-Organ Transplant

[underpants]

Source: Fox News

A six-year-old Minnesota girl who was horrifically disemboweled after sitting on an open drain in a swimming pool has received three new organs, KETV.com reported Wednesday.

Abigail Taylor received a new small bowel, liver and pancreas in the rare triple-organ transplant at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, KETV.com reported.

UNMC Chief of Transplantation Dr. Alan Langas told KETV.com that Taylor was one of the oldest patients he has seen.

Taylor was hospitalized last summer when the powerful suction pump tore out part of her intestinal tract at the Minneapolis Golf Club. At the time of the incident, the girl's family said it was a "medical miracle" that Taylor was still alive.



Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317578,00.html

---

This is STILL going on? I guess John Edwards didn't win enough of in punitive damages to make them correct their ways or fix the existing ones.

Notice it is a "mishap" as if this never happened before. Of course there is no mention of Edwards trial on this menace.

[Whoa_Nelly]

1. Could you enlighten me, please re: Edwards trial...?

Am not aware about what you posted re: Edwards, punitive damages, trial, menace

thanks :hi:

[underpants]

4. Sees Ava's post #3

one of the "Four Cases" that Edwards writes about in the book of the same name is about this but I thought it happened 15 or 20 years ago

A little girl is sitting on the drain of a kiddie pool, the drain is turned on, and her lower intestines and most of her organs are sucked out. Horrific. The pump maker tries to settle for $250K not close to what it will take for her medical treatment (she is still alive) so Edwards takes it to court and never takes a settlement (even though the family is nervous about getting completely shut out). Edwards famously argues the final day for 2 or 2 1/2 hours with no notes, not once going back to his desk, etc. Apparently every lawyer/judge in the Raleigh area cleared their docket to be at this trial. Legendary closing argument-the jury was in his hands at the end. They awarded $25 Million or something like that.

[Whoa_Nelly]

6. Now I see...Abigail Taylor and Edwards are two different cases

However, BOTH are about the same pool drain manufacturer, Sta-Rite.
Thanks for taking the time to help me figure this out :hi:



Edwards:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edwards

<snip>
In 1993, Edwards began his own firm in Raleigh (now known as Kirby & Holt) with a friend, David Kirby. He became known as the top plaintiffs' attorney in North Carolina.<11> The biggest case of his legal career was a 1997 product liability lawsuit against Sta-Rite, the manufacturer of a defective pool drain cover. The case involved a three-year-old girl<13> who was disemboweled by the suction power of the pool drain pump when she sat on an open pool drain whose protective cover other children at the pool had removed, after the swim club had failed to install the cover properly. Despite 12 prior suits with similar claims, Sta-Rite continued to make and sell drain covers lacking warnings. Sta-Rite protested that an additional warning would have made no difference because the pool owners already knew the importance of keeping the cover secured.

In his closing arguments, Edwards spoke to the jury for an hour and a half and referenced his son, Wade, who had been killed shortly before testimony began. Mark Dayton, editor of North Carolina Lawyers Weekly, would later call it "the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen."<14> The jury awarded the family $25 million, the largest personal injury award in North Carolina history. The company settled for the $25 million while the jury was deliberating additional punitive damages, rather than risk losing an appeal. For their part in this case, Edwards and law partner David Kirby earned the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's national award for public service.<12> The family said that they hired Edwards over other attorneys because he alone had offered to accept a smaller percentage as fee unless the award was unexpectedly high, while all of the other lawyers they spoke with said they required the full one-third fee. The size of the jury award was unprecedented, and Edwards did receive the standard one-third plus expenses fee typical of contingency cases. The family was so impressed with his intelligence and commitment<11> that they volunteered for his Senate campaign the next year.

And child/family he was representing at that time:
http://ncstormtrack.com/news/local/story/160341/



Abigail Taylor:

http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/11828721.html

<snip>
The suit blamed both the club, located in St. Louis Park, and Sta-Rite Industries, a pool equipment manufacturer owned by a Golden Valley company, for the accident, in which 21 feet of Abigail Taylor's small intestine were sucked out when she landed on an uncovered suction outlet in the kiddie pool in June.

[]bRobert Bennett, attorney for the family, said that Abigail's lifetime medical expenses alone could total $30 million, far more than the $6 million in liability insurance he said the Golf Club possesses. Compensation for pain and suffering could add to the damages.

[underpants]

8. I know a guy who used to be a lifeguard

when I told him about this he said "Oh that must have been why they told us to tell the kids not to sit on the drain"

:eyes: I guess that beats replacing them.

You are welcome. I was real close on most of the facts. What an amazing story in so many ways.

[DURHAM D]

7. And as a result - the accident in Minnesota would not happen in N.C. today.

The laws/rules were changed and changed dramatically in North Carolina regarding drains in wading and swimming pools.

I thought the changes for swimming pool safety were happening all over the country. Maybe not or maybe some have just been slow to pick up on how to prevent this kind of accident.

[kestrel91316]

9. This case is one of the reasons I REALLY love Edwards.

[Hieronymus]

12. Thank God for John Edwards. Cons and Hillary supporters call him an

ambulance chaser for defending that little girl.

[juajen]

13. I'm a Hillary supporter, and I love John Edwards.

Just because I'm supporting Clinton does not mean I don't love and respect your candidate. He was my candidate in 2004. You use a broad brush. We should all support our dem candidates a little better, by giving them the respect they all deserve.

[Donnachaidh]

2. did she have to wait for organs?

What a horrific accident.

[Ava]

3. i read about this case in his book

which is an excellent book btw. it's horrible and it makes me sick to my stomach that someone would criticize a lawyer for trying to get a victim compensation.. at least as much as they can. my stepfather is a trial lawyer who deals with similar wrongful death and injury cases. it's just depressing as hell to read about some of his cases, especially since most are the result of large corporations and companies neglecting to care about the safety of their consumers enough to pay more to fix a problem.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

5. Common in corporate America.

Lee Iacocca would rather have people be burned alive in Pintos when he was CEO of Ford, due to rupturing gas tanks, instead of spending about $10 to make the gas tanks safer.

He'd rather have their insurance company pay out millions of dollars in damages for wrongful deaths and major injuries, not to mention tons of bad publicity, that forced Ford to stop making the Pinto.

In legal circles, the Pinto was known as "the Molotov". (as in Molotov cocktail) :cry:

[brentspeak]

10. Iacocca's changed a lot since then

He has a recent book, "Where Have All the Leaders Gone?", where he rails against corporate crooks who've shipped American jobs overseas and basically run the nation into the ground.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

11. He has quite a bit of blood on his hands.

MKJ

[RamboLiberal]

14. James Baker's granddaughter died from a pool drain accident

A lawsuit was filed against three pool companies for the entrapment death of 7-year-old Virginia Graeme Baker, granddaughter of former Secretary of State James Baker.

According to the plaintiffs, on June 15, 2002, the child was entrapped in a family friend's spa during a party. Her buttocks became stuck to the vessel's single drain, holding her underwater while various individuals tried in succession to save her. Eventually, she was freed, but it was too late.

The suit named Hayward Pool Products of Elizabeth, N.J., which produced the drain cover on the single-drain spa; Poolservice Co. of Arlington, Va., which maintained the pool and inground spa; and Sta-Rite of Delavan, Wis., manufacturer of the pump on the site. Sta-Rite settled for an undisclosed amount before the complaint was served, said the manufacturer's attorney, James V. Etscorn of Baker & Hostetler, LLP, in Orlando, Fla.

The drain cover was not an anti-vortex or anti-entrapment version and hadn't been damaged or loosened before the incident, according to Baker attorney Michael Haggard. "The whole fallacy to the pool and spa industry's argument that if you just maintain your drain cover, everything will be fine is gone now," said Haggard of Haggard, Parks, Haggard & Lewis in Coral Gables, Fla. "Everything was intact. It was operating exactly as intended."

-----

Etscom said he could not disclose any terms of the Sta-Rite settlement, but that it was no reflection on a $104 million decision against the manufacturer last year. In that case, the caregivers of a young man blamed the manufacturer for an entrapment accident that left him in a permanent vegetative state. Sta-Rite is appealing the decision. Baker attorney Michael Haggard also worked on that case.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NTB/is_1_44/ai_n8968521

So the shame was Sta-Rite didn't learn from the Edward's judgement! Oh and a law languished in Congress till we got a Dem congress and finally enough attention from the tragic accident to Abigail Taylor that Senator's Klobuchar and Coleman got it passed and agreement reached for it to become law just this week. The Baker family had unsuccessfully lobbied the damn Repuke congress for this law!

Their daughter's story attracted powerful allies to their cause. Klobuchar and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., co-sponsored a bill requiring that any pool drain cover sold or distributed had to meet safety standards to prevent entrapment.

Last Thursday, Klobuchar learned that a Senate agreement was reached and called Taylor.

On Wednesday she recalled that phone call as "really the most touching moment I've had as a senator ... being able to call Scott Taylor from the Senate cloakroom and tell him that the bill had just passed, and that it was going to be signed by the president."

The law is named for the 7-year-old granddaughter of former Secretary of State James Baker III. Virginia Graeme Baker drowned in 2002 after suction in a spa trapped her under water. Abigail's injury brought renewed momentum to reform efforts, which had languished, Klobuchar said.

So on Monday, Abigail got her transplant the same day Congress passed the pool safety law. On Wednesday, President Bush signed it into law.

http://www.startribune.com/local/12624766.html

[CRF450]

15. I took a CPO (Certified Pool Operator) course last year...

And everyone in the class watched a recorded episode from Larry King Live about that accident. So I clean pools and spas at cottages durring the summer. We have to make sure that the drain covers and skimmer baskets in the pools & spas are secure and not damaged. Not only for the saftey of who's swimming in the pool but to prevent stuff from cloggin up the pipes and causing damage.