The doctor told Martin that his daughter went into cardiac arrest.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m listening to the sort of chaos on the other end of the phone,\u201d Martin said, describing the phone call the day his daughter was declared brain dead on April 10, 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre her pupils responsive?\u201d Martin asked, to which the doctor responded they were not.<\/p>\n
Martin said he knew at that moment that he had lost his daughter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hung up the phone and I was in shock,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Martin later learned from the medical examiner that his daughter died from cardiac arrest due to several narcotics given for pain, according to the Pelham, New York, resident and his lawyer, Christopher Mattei of Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder.<\/p>\n
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that \u201cthe facility failed to ensure that an adequate\/complete physician\u2019s telephone order was directed to prevent an unintentional duplication of narcotic medications.\u201d<\/p>\n
The CMS report said further that the medical doctor \u201cacknowledged that he should have been specific and verbally directed to discontinue the Morphine IVP and start Dilaudid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martin filed a lawsuit in Waterbury Superior Court against Waterbury Hospital, the doctor and nurse overseeing Dale Martin\u2019s care, The Connecticut Spine and Disc Institute and Prospect Medical Holdings, the previous owner of the hospital, alleging that Dale Martin\u2019s death was \u201ccaused by the failure of Waterbury Hospital\u201d to adequately care for and monitor their daughter, according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithin 14 hours of admission, providers at the hospital had administered so much pain medication that Dale stopped breathing and later died,\u201d the lawsuit said. \u201cNo one checked on Dale during this time. The same medications that were interfering with Dale\u2019s breathing were also sedating her. Dale could not even call for help as she suffocated. At 7 a.m. on April 10, a Waterbury Hospital nurse finally checked on Dale. It was far too late. Her heart had stopped beating.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Prospect](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/prospect1a.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Shahrzad Rasekh\/CT Mirror<\/p>\n
Waterbury Hospital is one of three facilities owned by Prospect Medical Holdings in Connecticut. (Shahrzad Rasekh\/CT Mirror)<\/p>\n
Waterbury Hospital struggled for years under the ownership of Prospect Medical Holdings, a California-based private equity company that state and federal officials said drained profits from the hospital at the expense of patient care.<\/p>\n
When Prospect filed for bankruptcy in January 2025, all three of the hospitals it owned in the state, including Manchester Memorial and Rockville General, were for years struggling with inadequate staffing, antiquated equipment and financial challenges.<\/p>\n
In January, Hartford HealthCare purchased Manchester Memorial and Rockville General. UConn Health purchased Waterbury Hospital two months later.<\/p>\n
Prospect spurred scrutiny about the role of private equity in healthcare companies and concerns that such firms strip equity and cut costs to the detriment of the hospital and its patients.<\/p>\n
The role of private equity in patient care is an important aspect of the lawsuit, Mattei said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will obviously learn more about the extent to which Prospect\u2019s mismanagement of Waterbury Hospital contributed to the specific circumstances on the night that Dale died,\u201d Mattei said. \u201cBut what we expect to find is that this was a hospital that was largely operating on fumes as a result of Prospect dismantling infrastructure within the hospital, reducing staff, training, and finding every way possible to extract value out of the hospital in a way that jeopardized care.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prospect Medical Holdings and the Connecticut Spine and Disc Institute did not return emails for comment for this story.<\/p>\n
Lauresha Xhihani, administrative director of communications and marketing for UConn Health Waterbury Hospital, said \u201cthis matter involves events that occurred in April 2025 when a different owner, Prospect Medical Holdings, operated Waterbury Hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n
Citing the new ownership of the hospital, Xhihani said, \u201cThe quality, safety and wellbeing of our patients is our top priority.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ed Gadomski, Connecticut Healthcare Associates Internal Union organizer, who represents the nurses and technicians at Waterbury Hospital, told the Courant that under Prospect\u2019s ownership, \u201cthe hospital was severely understaffed, leaving nurses burdened with assignment overload of patients, lack of needed medical supplies, and deteriorating physical conditions that worsened on a daily basis when hospital ownership refused to reinvest monies back into the hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis all leads to a higher potential of a possible bad outcome or patient harm,\u201d Gadomski continued. \u201dCost cutting which included staff reductions can lead to effects such as longer wait times, falls, hospital-acquired infections, and other events. The sad part of the story is that there are certainly situations that could have been preventable if patient care was valued over profits.\u201d<\/p>\n
State Sen. Saud Anwar, a South Windsor Democrat and co-chair of the Public Health Committee, who has advocated for legislation restricting private equity in hospitals, said, \u201cNo private equity\u2019s profit is worth a patient\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen private equity starts to look at the patient as a source of their investors\u2019 return, rather than the patient\u2019s wellbeing, we have taken a wrong path,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd there\u2019s no balance sheet that can measure the worth of a human life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anwar said that private equity created a healthcare crisis in communities it served.<\/p>\n
Matt Parr, communications director at the Private Equity Stakeholder\u2019s Project, a nonprofit research watchdog of the private equity industry, said because of the vast amount of money that was taken out of the system, Prospect did not have the financial resources to properly staff hospitals.<\/p>\n
Calls for restriction of private equity<\/p>\n
For years, doctors and health experts have pointed to the detrimental effects of private equity on patient care, with studies showing an increase in falls, infection risk and deaths, in hospitals owned by private equity companies.<\/p>\n
Dr. Zirui Song, associate professor of healthcare policy and medicine at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, who has studied private equity in hospitals for the last five years, recently published a study with several other researchers in the Annals of Internal Medicine which found a 13% increase in patient deaths in the emergency departments of private equity hospitals compared to those that were not owned by private equity.<\/p>\n
Song has said staffing cuts have been a common strategy after private equity acquisition of acute care hospitals. In private equity hospitals there was an increase of seven deaths per 10,000 ED visits relative to non-private equity hospitals, according to Song\u2019s study.<\/p>\n
State and federal lawmakers have called for legislation restricting private equity.<\/p>\n
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has spoken on the negative impact of private equity on healthcare. Last summer he issued a report: \u201cA Dangerous Prospect: How Private Equity Decimated Connecticut Hospitals,\u201d finding that Prospect Medical \u201cemployed a \u2018buy, strip, flip\u2019 strategy in which they sold off assets while gutting staff \u2026 and degraded the safety and quality of care for vulnerable communities without the financial means to fight back,\u201d according to information released from Murphy\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
This year, Murphy introduced legislation with Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa, to ban private equity ownership of hospitals and nursing homes, making them ineligible to receive Medicare funding. The legislation has yet to pass.<\/p>\n
In the state, Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney called for the legislature this year to restrict private equity in the healthcare, nursing homes, housing, child care and special education industries, saying its role in essential public services is \u201cdangerous and toxic as a matter of public policy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gov. Ned Lamont signed legislation in May that beginning on July 1, 2027, prohibits hospitals from entering into sale-leaseback transactions, which involve a company selling a hospital\u2019s building and land on its main campus, then forcing it to pay rent for its use. The new law also requires hospitals to annually attest to the Department of Public Health that no private equity entity has a controlling interest in the hospital.<\/p>\n
Sen. Jeff Gordon, a Woodstock Republican and physician, said that he voted against the legislation because it did not go far enough in restricting private equity.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel very strongly that the bill ended up being a waste,\u201d he said. \u201cIt really needed to go further and be stronger to protect hospitals from private equity. It completely failed because it still allows private equity to be involved, even if not a majority stake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anwar said the bill restricts private equity from hospital ownership, but that there are other areas where legislators can remove or reduce private equity\u2019s impact.<\/p>\n
Lawmakers also passed legislation that requires, beginning in February 2028, that each nursing home annually attest that no investment entity has control over resident \u201chealth, safety or care,\u201d according to the Office of Legislative Research analysis of the law.<\/p>\n
Looking for answers<\/p>\n
When Martin\u2019s daughter was declared brain dead last year, there was a 72-hour waiting period to see if she would regain brain function.<\/p>\n
Martin said that while watching his daughter hooked up to a ventilator, he sought answers from the hospital but did not get an explanation.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor three days, we set vigil in her hospital room, listening to the beeping of the monitors and seeing the machines keep her lungs and heart moving, waiting for the expiration of the 72 hours,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd in that time, you know, we kept asking, how did this happen?\u201d<\/p>\n
Dale Martin never regained brain function and doctors took her off the ventilator on April 13, 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s incredibly difficult to wrap your head around how this can happen in a hospital that\u2019s supposed to be a house of healing,\u201d Martin said. \u201cThere\u2019s no explanation for how this could occur.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reflecting on Prospect\u2019s ownership, Martin said, \u201cwe didn\u2019t know till after Dale\u2019s death that she was admitted to a bankrupt hospital that was under investigation where nurses allegedly were buying food for patients, where the level of funding was so constrained that the hospital may not have been able to function properly. Dale did not have a choice of where to go. She was brought to the nearest hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martin takes long pauses, often becoming choked up as he speaks about his daughter.<\/p>\n
Dale Martin was a rising senior at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She was taking a sabbatical to work at a farm in Bethlehem, her father said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was a nonjudgmental, giving person,\u201d Martin said. \u201cShe was a volunteer music teacher to disadvantaged children and held herself out as a helper in life.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the rise of private equity in healthcare is unsettling.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will say the sophistication of the financial engineering that underwrites this greed is hard to stop,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, where there\u2019s money to be made, people find a way to get around the intent of the rules.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dale Martin was an organ donor and her father said he received a letter from the recipient of her transplanted heart who said, \u201cit is often the case that the recipient of an organ takes on the personality of the donor,\u201d describing how he had been a coldhearted person.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut with Dale\u2019s heart, he now cries at cat videos and is a much more empathetic human being,\u201d Martin said. \u201cI would describe Dale as one of the most empathetic, caring people who\u2019s ever walked the face of the planet and part of her is still doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Lindsay Martin received a panicked phone call from his wife about his 21-year-old daughter, he found it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":878623,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[369466,369461,369463,97,252,253,9447,2932,2077,3201,128045,204513,204512,369465,369464,79391,150640,369462],"class_list":["post-878622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-connecticut-general-assembly","tag-dale-alice-martin","tag-ed-gadomski","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-hospitals","tag-lawsuit","tag-legislation","tag-private-equity","tag-prospect-medical-holdings","tag-sen-jeff-gordon","tag-sen-saud-anwar","tag-senate-president-pro-tem-martin-looney","tag-u-s-sen-chris-murphy","tag-uconn-health","tag-waterbury-hospital","tag-waterbury-superior-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=878622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/878623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=878622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=878622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=878622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}