Grieving Family To Get Up To $10 Million

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Published on September 25, 2012, 11:20 pm
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Montefiore Center will pay several million dollars to the grieving family of a beloved Bronx mom who died in the OR while trying to donate a kidney to her brother. Yolanda Medina bled to death when surgeons accidentally cut her aorta.

Although the exact terms of Tuesday’s out-of-court settlement were confidential, wrongful-death experts familiar with such cases said the hospital’s payout would be in the ballpark of $7 million to $10 million.

Yolanda Medina, 41, who left behind three little girls — ages 3, 8 and 11 — bled to death on May 23, 2012 when transplant surgeons accidentally cut her aorta during the organ-harvesting operation. An unknowing Roberto Medina lay in an adjacent operating room awaiting his sister’s generous gift of life.

Days after the tragedy, Montefiore President Steven Safyer made the unusual request to Bronx Administrative Judge Douglas McKeon to expedite a settlement before a lawsuit was even filed.

The hospital was eager to put the case and the headlines behind it, hoping to salvage Montefiore’s lucrative live-donor kidney transplant program. The program was shut down after Yolanda Medina’s shocking death. A state Health Department probe is ongoing.

Under a novel grant from the federal government, McKeon directed the negotiators to get all the parties together and resolve a case that would otherwise drag on for years and cost millions of dollars to try.

Due to the loss of parental guidance, Yolanda Medina’s three girls will get an estimated $2 million each to secure their futures. Montefiore is also paying Roberto Medina, a married father of four, six figures.

 

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Jonas Bronck is the pseudonym under which we publish and manage the content and operations of The Bronx Daily.™ | Bronx.com - the largest daily news publication in the borough of "the" Bronx with over 1.5 million annual readers. Publishing under the alias Jonas Bronck is our humble way of paying tribute to the person, whose name lives on in the name of our beloved borough.