MIAMI (WSVN) - An additional family is filing a lawsuit against a Hollywood nursing home that saw the deaths of 11 patients after it lost power during Hurricane Irma.
The family of 93-year-old Miguel Franco is heartbroken and devastated after, they said, their loved one did not have to die in extreme heat at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills.
Franco and 10 others died after the facility lost power. The generator at the facility did not power the air conditioning units, and the people inside suffered from extreme heat.
Now, Franco’s family still wants justice for his death. “I’m so sad that he’s gone,” said Pedro Franco, the nursing home resident’s son. “I demand justice.”
“One of the hardest things on my mind right now is that that day, I wished him ‘Happy Birthday,’ and I had told him, ‘Grandpa, I will be coming in a week to celebrate our birthdays and to see you again,’ and I just replay it in my head every time now,” said Erika Navarro, Franco’s granddaughter.
Franco died a week after his birthday.
“How do you explain, or help yourself, knowing that they’re gone?” said Navarro.
The lawsuit is citing negligence, bringing up the fact that there was a hospital nearby and that it took three days for 911 to be called. The family is demanding justice and want answers from Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
“It is absolutely stunning to us that they did not take emergency action when this tragedy began to unfold,” said the family’s attorney, Curtis Miner.
Miguel’s wife of 62 years, 90-year-old Cecilia, is now in critical condition. She was also a resident at the facility.
“All they had to do was call 911,” said Pedro Franco. “I can’t stop thinking about what really happened.”
However, there are questions now about Scott, who gave out his cellphone number to nursing home administrators before the hurricane.
According to reports, at least four messages from the Rehabilitation Center were received by the governor’s phone and deleted. However, according to a statement from Scott’s office, the voicemails were deleted after being given to the proper officials.
The statement read in part, “The voicemails were not retained because the information from each voicemail was collected by the Governor’s staff and given to the proper agency for handling. Every call was returned. The information collected from the voicemails was released to the public this week, along with over 150 pages of other documents.”
The statement also stated, “None of this changes the fact that this facility chose not to call 911 or evacuate their patients to the hospital across the street to save lives.”
7News spoke with the governor, Monday afternoon, when he came to Miami to thank first responders during Irma. He explained the process of keeping and deleting voicemails, saying all the information from these messages was siphoned off to various agencies.
“I’m like everybody else. You get lots of voicemails, and I go through the process – we have a process,” he said. “If you send me a voicemail, somebody will look at your voicemail, send it to the right agency, somebody calls them back. That’s exactly what we did in this case, but let’s remember, this facility, they’re a health care provider. They’re supposed to call 911 if a patient’s in danger. There’s a hospital right across the street.”
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