They callously ignored her.
Esmin Green is seen in these infuriating images collapsing on the psychiatric emergency-room floor at Kings County Hospital – stared at by one worker, ignored by a security guard, and finally nudged by a health-care staffer on June 19.
She lay there for an hour before doctors and nurses snapped to attention and tried to revive the 49-year-old Jamaica native.
It was too late.
The shocking video was released by lawyers suing KCH in federal court on an unrelated matter.
“I heard about it and it’s horrible how she died like that,” said Green’s landlady, Beatrice Wallace, of East 94th Street in Brooklyn.
She’d lived there until just days before she died.
The needless death resulted in the immediate firings of the director of psychiatry, the doctor on duty and the director of security, said a spokeswoman for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp., which runs the municipal hospital.
Two nurses and a security guard were suspended pending hearings.
“We are all shocked and distressed by this situation,” HHC President Alan D. Aviles said in a statement last night. “It is clear that some of our employees failed to act based on our compassionate standards of care.”
He added that “as a result of this tragic incident, we will put into place additional and significant reforms” to protect psych patients.
A federal court order will be signed today, directing the hospital to assemble a search team to fill the spots of the fired staff, and establishing guidelines to reduce the waiting time at the emergency room.
HHC said Green was brought to the psychiatric e.r. by EMS medics on the morning of June 18, suffering from agitation and psychosis.
The patient refused medical review and was admitted against her will.
She was left in the e.r., supposedly under supervision, waiting for a bed in the inpatient unit to become available.
Nearly 24 hours later, on the morning on June 19, she was found unresponsive on the floor.
Shockingly, more than a year earlier, the New York Civil Liberties Union and others sued KCH over unsatisfactory conditions there.
The lawsuit, filed at Brooklyn federal court, described conditions in the psychiatric unit as “squalor,” more like a squatter camp than a hospital.
“The pattern of neglect and abuse at Kings County Hospital Center is an affront to human dignity,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said at the time.
“The New Yorkers most in need of our care and support are being denied their basic rights by the very institutions entrusted to protect these individuals.”