A family is demanding answers after a patient clad only in a hospital gown was found on a Chicago hospital roof seven hours after she went missing, and later died of hypothermia.
Chelsea Adolphus, 28, was seen on video leaving her room at Vista Medical Center East about 2 a.m. Thursday, Lake County Coroner Jennifer Banek said at a Monday news conference. Staff later put out an alert, but she was not found until 8:45 a.m.
When staff finally located Adolphus on a second-floor roof, her body temperature was 50 degrees, Banek said. They tried for 14 hours to revive her, but she died of hypothermia from exposure to the sub-freezing temperatures.
“Me and my family are going through a horrible time mentally. Mentally, just shocked,” Adolphus’s brother Paul Adolphus said at the briefing. “We want to know exactly what happened from when my sister stepped foot in that facility.”
“I’m hurt. I’m sad,” her mother, Yolanda Adolphus, told WLS-TV. “I want answers. Answers to know what happened to my daughter.”
Banek, who once worked at the hospital, had flagged safety and other concerns as far back as 2023, she recounted. She noted that the Illinois Department of Public Health had validated those concerns by revoking Vista’s level-2 trauma designation for five weeks.
The coroner flagged the hospital again in February 2024, warning that “lives were at stake,” she said. More recently, she said, Vista Medical Center furloughed 69 employees — staff responsible for sitting with patients to ensure their safety. The hospital, owned by American Health Care Systems and operated by Vista, is also behind on its water bill, owes $1 million in back taxes and owes a slate of clinical providers, vendors, the city of Waukegan and the police department money for services, Banek said.
“We rely on evidence-based practices, transparency and effective oversight as protective measures to make certain people do not die,” Banek said. “A death is not the threshold by which we should be measuring the necessity for a call to action. American Health Care Systems must be held accountable to provide safe, quality health care to Waukegan and its surrounding communities.”
Banek also ordered the hospital to preserve “all paper, video, digital and electronic evidence,” something that Vista Health System president and CEO Kevin Spiegel said was routine recordkeeping.
“We have reported the incident to the state and regulatory agencies and are cooperating fully with them, as well as local law enforcement,” Spiegel said. “It is critical for the community, for the patient’s family and for all parties involved that a robust and unbiased investigation takes place.”
With News Wire Services
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