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They award $11-million in the case of a Sarasota girl left paralyzed and blind after surgery for a tumor. She later died of cancer.
By JOUNICE L. NEALY
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 25, 2000
ST. PETERSBURG -- A jury returned an $11-million award Wednesday against a neurosurgeon who performed brain surgery on a Sarasota girl who was left paralyzed and blind.
After deliberating three hours, the six jurors found that the surgeon, Dr. Louis Solomon, was negligent. They awarded $7-million to the girl's father, Richard Roud, and $4-million to the estate of his daughter, Jessica.
Roud blamed the surgeon for his daughter's paralysis, loss of sight and inability to swallow. He had sought $16-million, plus an undisclosed amount for Jessica's mother, Helen Barry, who received nothing.
"I think it's living proof that the civil justice system serves people well," said Richard Shapiro, Roud's attorney. Although the amount of the award seemed large, Shapiro said, "no one could live in the shoes of that little angel."
Jessica died from cancer last year in Sarasota at the age of 11.
"It's been 41/2 years," Roud said after the verdict. "I'm just thrilled."
Roud said the jury's verdict came back almost exactly six years to the minute after she got out of her first surgery.
Solomon had twice operated on Jessica in 1994 in attempts to remove a brain tumor. The second surgery is what caused Jessica's quality of life to diminish, the plaintiff argued. Shapiro argued that Solomon should not have performed the second surgery because the tumor had spread to her brain stem.
Instead of surgery, Shapiro said, Jessica could have been given chemotherapy or radiation treatment.
But defense attorney Clifford Somers said during closing arguments Wednesday that Solomon had followed protocol and that his treatment was successful because Jessica lived five years after the second surgery.
After the verdict, Somers said the jury's findings were excessive. "There's not justification for those amounts," he said.
During the trial, Somers said "neurosurgeons after all are not God."
Solomon doesn't deserve that much gratitude, Roud's attorney argued.
"They still want Richard Roud to thank Dr. Solomon for putting his daughter in a wheelchair," Shapiro said during closing statements. "How dare they."
After the second surgery, Jessica was nearly comatose. For nearly a year, she couldn't speak. Slowly, she improved, but Jessica never again walked, swallowed or was able to see.
Roud quit his job to care for his daughter full-time while his brother supported them financially. Roud and Jessica's mother, Helen Barry, separated when Jessica was 1 year old. She did not attend the trial because it was too emotional for her, Shapiro said.
On March 20, 1994, Jessica was playing ball with schoolmates. She fell and hit her head. An MRI revealed the brain tumor.
Four days later, Solomon performed his first operation on Jessica. At the time, Solomon was the only pediatric neurosurgeon at All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg. Two days later, he went into Jessica's skull again to try to remove what was left of the tumor. Jessica suffered substantial neurological damage afterward.
If Solomon had taken heed of the stop signs, he never would have performed the second surgery, Shapiro argued.
But surgical protocol allowed Solomon the discretion of removing the tumor. "There is no stop sign. It's not there," Somers said during his closing statement. Solomon discovered there was more tumor, his attorney said, and he had to get control of it.
No matter how much tumor there was, Jessica was determined not to let it get the best of her. She took acting classes and beat thousands of elementary school students in a playwright competition.
Dictating into a tape recorder, she created a play about a princess who wanted to be a regular person.
In 1998, Jessica vowed, "I'm not going to let a stupid little tumor bother me."