Site menu:

Questions & Answers: of the site

Information for people contemplating
a career in emergency medicine and
other medical specialties

By Kevin Pezzi, MD

1. Racially motivated murder by paramedics
2. Paramedics raping patients

by Kevin Pezzi, MD

An investigative journalist could win a Pulitzer Prize by writing about the shocking revelations I exposed in this article.

I've worked in several different emergency rooms in a variety of settings, and I've learned that some cities have a disproportionate share of people who do strange things. Unless you work in an ER of a town with a high “weirdness quotient” you may have a hard time believing people can do some of the strange things described in my books. If that's true, it is a good sign: it means you are fairly normal and you haven't spent much time around the bizarre fringe element in our society.

In general, I think people are naturally incredulous when they read of incidents far outside the behavioral norms they previously experienced. In this regard I'm just like you, except I have a higher threshold of incredulousness as a result of being exposed to so many odd things I once thought would have been impossible. Nevertheless, I can be very skeptical when reading about events I never heard of in the past.

It was with this mindset that I initially reacted with skepticism to information sent to me by a paramedic (who I'll call Ed) alleging that some of his co-workers committed acts so extreme they could only be described as savage. However, Ed seemed to be genuinely and passionately repulsed by these acts, and he provided me with extensive documentation to support his allegations. The events that I found most heinous are summarized below. Warning: I will not euphemize the crude and offensive words since I think they are essential to a full and unadulterated appreciation of these acts.

1. Ed said that his partner Clyde became enraged when they were dispatched to the scene of a motor vehicle accident involving a potential fatality. Clyde was apparently upset that this would not allow him to sleep during the remainder of his shift, hence interfering with his plans for the next day. Clyde allegedly said that if the person were “a nigger” then that person would die because he would not help him. After arriving at the scene of the accident and finding that the injured people were black, Clyde refused to assist them, leaving Ed to care for multiple victims by himself. After one person died Clyde began working, but Ed claimed that it was at such a deliberately slow pace that he was more of a hindrance than a help. Later, as the remaining victims were being transported in the ambulance to the ER, Ed said that Clyde taunted another patient while he was dying, saying that he purposely withheld care to kill him and his friend because they were black.
2. On another occasion Ed reported that paramedics were summoned to assist a person who collapsed at home as a result of an apparent heart attack. According to Ed, the medic who attended to the patient simply closed the door and did nothing while his partner obtained a history from the patient's spouse, who was told that everything possible was being done. The medic with the patient allegedly waited until the cardiac monitor showed a flat line, then telephoned the patient's doctor to inform him of the death.

Murdering a patient by purposely withholding care (while maintaining a pretense of giving it) is not a rare event. When I was in training the senior residents would often announce that a certain code would be a “slow code” in which we would go through the motions of doing the right things but do them so slowly it would be of no use to the patient. On other occasions the senior residents would tell us to take our sweet time in responding to a code so that the patient would be more likely to have died by the time we arrived. They had more important things to do than save lives, apparently. If the senior residents thought a patient had lived long enough, they appointed themselves God, or at least head of the Death Panel.

I think these slow codes are ridiculous. If a person is being coded, then everything possible should be done for that patient. Lollygagging during the course of a code and then telling the patient's family that “we did everything possible” is dishonest and unprofessional. To the best of my recollection, all of these slow codes were ordered on people who were in poor health with a negligible chance of a recovery. Nevertheless, the law does not allow physicians to arbitrarily decide which people should be given a chance to live and which should be doomed to die.

I have had a few patients whose recovery could only be described as miraculous. I would love to take credit for their turnarounds, but I cannot honestly say that the care I delivered directly resulted in their recovery. If nothing else, these miracles underscore the fact that doctors can't always predict if a patient will recover. Hence, healthcare providers should not withhold care (or administer it halfheartedly) except when they are acting in accordance with the expressed wishes of the patient or his family, but halfhearted care is difficult to justify.

One might excuse the slow codes described above as resulting from well-intentioned but illegal physician arrogance, but withholding care from a patient who has a fair chance of being salvable (such as a patient with a heart problem) is totally inexcusable.

1. Ed asseverated that paramedics from his city felt an obligation to the taxpayers to curb the abuses of the healthcare system perpetrated by black patients who were, they claimed, all on welfare. According to Ed, the paramedics fought this racial war by withholding care or, when that was not sufficient, by injecting patients with the wrong drug or an overdose of the correct drug. Killing a patient in this manner is easy to do and virtually untraceable in a practical sense.
2. Ed said that he and his partner were dispatched to the scene of an accident and found a young woman unconscious in one of the cars involved in the collision. Ed alleges that his partner began gawking at the victim, commenting on how she was such a “nice piece of ass.” Ed began assisting another patient who was ejected from the vehicle while his partner moved the comatose patient into the ambulance. When Ed later opened the door of the ambulance he found that his partner had removed all of her clothing and was sexually fondling her. Ed resumed working on his patient, who was transferred to a hospital by another ambulance that had been sent to the scene. Ed said that his partner was later bragging that he had intercourse with the patient, and he marveled at her “tight pussy and firm tits.” Ed also reported that his partner stole her bra and panties as a souvenir.

Are paramedics playing God, deciding who lives and who dies? Are they defiling helpless young women? While I think such behavior is extremely rare, it does occur. Paramedics are not, however, the only perpetrators. There have been several well-publicized cases involving nurses, doctors, and dentists. No veterinarians that I know of, but even that wouldn't surprise me.

Several years ago I had a patient whose perversion was in a class by itself—I hope. In case any children are reading this, I'll euphemize this to spare them from being exposed to one of the few deviances that has not yet been covered by the media. This fellow's aberrancy centered on his pastime of sampling the sensory delights of females from different species. After that revelation, I wasn't very surprised when he told me that he wanted to become a veterinarian. I probably should have reported him to the SPCA, but that would have been a breach of patient confidentiality. Instead, I tried to dissuade him from boinking any more animals by telling him about the few cases I'd heard of in which animals, apparently not enjoying such intimate attention, put their molester's organ out of commission by biting it.

OK, enough digression, and back to the matter of paramedic malfeasance. I was particularly unnerved by Ed's assertions because they meshed with some suspicions that I've had about a few paramedics. While almost all paramedics are honorable people who are motivated by the desire to help people (and to pay the bills, of course), for a long time I have had a vague, admittedly inchoate, suspicion that a small percentage of them are not quite right mentally. In some cases my hunches are not just nebulous intuitions but concerns that have at least some basis in fact. A few female patients who were unconscious in the ambulance have subsequently complained that their undergarments were either missing or, in one particularly odd case, put on backwards. (If their blue jeans [or other outer garments] are still on but their underwear is missing or on backwards, something very odd happened!) Two women said they felt as if they'd just had intercourse, yet both denied any recent sexual activity. At the time I didn't know what to make of their remarks since I implicitly trusted the paramedics and it never occurred to me that they could do something so abominable. Whether or not anything did happen is debatable, but the next time I hear such a complaint I won't gloss over it.

In Love & Lust in the ER, I told the story about how I think (but couldn't feasibly prove) that an ER tech raped one of my patients: a gorgeous but comatose young woman.

In my blog, I discussed how my boss stopped working on a young child nearing death. I entered the room at the beginning of my shift to find him and others with their arms crossed standing so far from the patient that one might have thought the kid was radioactive. I knew they were just waiting for the patient to die so they could go lie to his mother how they did everything possible for him. I stepped in and saved the child's life. That was not a difficult “save.” For my boss to give up on that child was simply inexcusable, but he is not the only doc who prematurely pulls the plug on patients. The public would be outraged if they knew the prevalence of half-assed healthcare.

One of the first lessons that all emergency medical personnel (from EMTs and paramedics to ER nurses and doctors) learn is that treating patients rapidly often makes the difference between life and death. Therefore, it is easy to understand how a paramedic could kill a patient by sexually abusing her, because that wastes time. I wouldn't be surprised if a few twisted paramedics kill patients they rape so their crimes are less likely to be discovered; dead women obviously don't give birth, nor do they develop sexually transmitted diseases, nor do they complain about missing underwear, an unexpected discharge, or post-coital sensation.

Murder is also the missing link in understanding why EMTs or paramedics nutty enough to rape patients would risk doing that, knowing the patient might regain consciousness during the assault. If a patient woke up, murder could keep her from talking. Dead women tell no tales.

Can medical examiners detect these depredations?

I spent a month during medical school in the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office, whose stated mission is to “provide forensic death investigations, autopsy, and toxicological services to the general public and medico-legal community so they can have documented, timely, and accurate cause and manner of death.”

Perhaps, if you're a big shot. Most stiffs on their cold slabs—at least the ones I saw—got only guesses, as in:

Obese male over the age of 40 = MI or “heart attack”

This quick guessing came as quite a shock to me. I'd grown up watching Quincy, M.E., a television series about a very principled county medical examiner (ME) who dug deep to determine the cause of death. That quest led Quincy to peer into things I never imagined anyone would look at, such as going past the anus and into the rectum to search for needle marks in a suspicious death case. Quincy might (a million years after once in a blue moon) examine semen inside the vagina of a woman who died in a car accident and DNA-test it to verify the paramedic who treated her didn't treat himself to a little fun, but in the real world, medical examiners don't have the time or resources ($) to consider every possible contributing factor to death. Paramedics know this, and some of the twisted ones exploit this inside information to literally get inside some women they wouldn't stand a chance with otherwise. Consequently, some healthcare personnel can and do get away with murder, figuratively and sometimes literally.

As a doctor, I filled out death certificates listing the cause of death, as if I always knew exactly what it was. Bereft of the requisite crystal ball, I could sometimes only formulate educated guesses on patients whose medical history was unknown to me—patients I'd never spoken to and had perhaps two minutes of contact with after they died—except the patient wasn't officially dead until I, as an MD, did a few quick tests to verify the person was indeed a goner.

Later, as an emergency physician, I'd sometimes speak with medical examiners about dead patients transported to the ER. In every case I recall, my guess about what killed them was accepted by the ME: a dream come true for killers who don't want to get caught. Are you reading this, Casey Anthony?

Caylee Anthony had an assiduous ME, Dr. Jan Garavaglia (a.k.a., “Dr. G”), yet she was still blasted by Dr. Werner Spitz, head of the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office during my stint there. Dr. Spitz is a living legend as a forensic pathologist and I have enormous respect for him, but I lost a bit of it that day when he criticized Dr. G, saying her work was “shoddy” because she didn't open Caylee's skull.

When I heard that, I wondered if Dr. Spitz knew what his pathologists were doing: treating many dead people—especially young black males—as if they had cooties or something. I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with those forensic pathologists as they guessed at the cause of death, often without autopsies or even touching the bodies. Techs would bring in another stiff, and we'd stand around in our spiffy white coats and guess what killed 'em. The only time I recall seeing an ME touch a young black male was when a pathologist speared a scrotum with a huge needle and ignited the escaping methane gas with a Bic^® lighter to form an instant blowtorch to entertain the impressionable young medical students under his tutelage.

What concerns me is that 99.999% of the time paramedics rape or kill patients, they get away with it. It's under the radar: it isn't detected and almost never reported. Ed is clearly an exception: principled, brave, and willing to devote his time and get involved in solving this problem instead of looking the other way. I genuinely respect Ed for that. If I get rich, I'll give him an award and a pile of cash because he deserves it. We often give adulation to people who don't deserve it, such as hot celebrities or athletes skilled at hitting or catching a ball. Wow. Really helps make the world a better place, doesn't it?

Doing the right thing means doing the right thing when no one is looking. In the early 1990s, I risked my future to save a young black male I had no responsibility to treat. In fact, by treating him, I could have been fired for breaking overly rigid rules and I could have been sued; I was supposed to stay in the ER and had malpractice coverage in it only. But on an uncharacteristically slow night shift, I gambled that I could be of more use to that inpatient, and I was: the residents were botching his code and almost certainly would have inadvertently killed him had I not arrived, spotted what they were doing wrong, corrected it, and administered the correct therapy.

Based on that, I have character because I went out of my way to save someone I couldn't bill, knowing that I had no malpractice coverage, and knowing that 85% of in-hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitations fail. The aforementioned paramedics waging their wicked race war do not have character; not only did they NOT do the right thing, they went out of their way to do the wrong thing.

Going out of your way to help others as a measure of character doesn't necessarily mean always doing it. I don't drink lemonade (it corrodes tooth enamel) but I stopped at what appeared to be a lemonade stand simply because I wanted to help the four young girls staffing it to reward their entrepreneurship. However, I didn't buy from a girl selling lemonade in LochenHeath during the Parade of Homes (2005? 2006?). I regret that because she appeared to be dejected from lack of sales, but I was tired. With an almost infinite number of ways we could help others, it isn't possible to help everyone in every possible way. While even good folks must be selective in helping, only evil people look for ways to hurt others.

A rapid cure for racism

I've previously written about a simple method I developed to eliminate racism, which I discussed in a Facebook note. Here is a synopsis of it:

Interesting research: Virtual bodyswapping diminishes people's negative biases about others

More interesting research: Not so different after all: Human cells, hardy microbes share common ancestor: A research team has found striking parallels between how archaeal and eukaryotic cells package and store their genetic material and Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor.

This means that if you have blue eyes, you and I are related. We're also related if someone biologically in your family has blue eyes. Yet go back even further and literally ALL of us are related, essentially brothers and sisters or cousins or however you wish to term it, but definitely related, part of one big family. That's one reason why it is so nuts to hate others, whether because of race, national origin, or some other factor; no matter what it is, our commonality far outweighs our differences—and differences are reason to celebrate, indicating we're not robotic clones.

Yes, I know: people usually feel more of an affinity to those more closely related to them, but ponder this: no matter how long ago we last shared a common ancestor, you may have the exact same gene for blue eyes as I do, and if you consider all possible human genes, we all share a remarkably high percentage of them; our similarities overwhelmingly dwarf our differences. Interestingly, fruit flies and many other species that look nothing like us possess biologic features similar or identical to what we have.

That's one reason I love dogs, cats, chickens, turkeys, other birds, and other animals, domestic or wild, along with trees, flowers, and other plants, including the diverse vegetables I enjoy planting every year and watching them grow.

People tend to be overly influenced by appearance, with concordance of that being a proxy for kinship. But raising chickens taught me a valuable lesson: that they aren't bird-brained as commonly presumed but amazingly intelligent with unique personalities. Loves sugar and other tasty food, basking in the sun, hanging around friends, security and a cozy home, hates boredom. That describes you, me, and my chickens. Though our last common ancestor was eons ago, we're still really birds of a feather. All of us.

Thus those racist paramedics killing patients because they are black are killing people amazingly similar to them. Nuts.

Update 2017

People are trained to camouflage racist sentiments by actively suppressing their expression, but sweeping them under the rug does not eradicate them. As Project Implicit demonstrated, most people harbor bias. Healthcare professions deal with it by tacitly assuming practitioners are not racist, but childishly turning a blind eye to a problem doesn't solve it. As documented in the reference section below, it is still there, infecting practitioners who'd swear up and down they are not racist but delivering worse care to blacks and other minorities because they think less of them. Some of the crazies more imbued with bias pose an even greater threat, such as intentionally killing black patients, as mentioned above.

Racial bias is so pervasive it affects all professions, including educators—which is surprising considering that most teachers are liberal (see reference section). Professionals are typically clever enough to masquerade around as if they have an exemplary veneer devoid of racism or bias, but the head-in-the-sand approach is just an act that doesn't address the roots of the problem.

Some of the roots are strange, indeed, as in the kooky notion by white supremacists that whites are superior. Really? The typical knuckle-dragging white supremacist is superior to Dr. Ben Carson and Barack Obama? Both Hollywood handsome and brainy: one a neurosurgeon turned United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the other President of the United States and hence a political genius—an incontrovertible fact even if your political views are antithetical to his.

After seeing thousands of naked bodies during my medical career (enough to form statistically significant conclusions), it was clear that black men tend to be more mesomorphic, often with bodies that look like chiseled Greek gods. It is easy to understand how this could elicit envy—which white supremacists cannot admit, even to themselves, because it doesn't mesh with their ideas about superiority.

Envy someone supposedly inferior to you? Does. Not. Compute.

Whether considering appearance, education, intelligence, accomplishments, or other facets of individuality, the range in variation in all races is so great one cannot draw valid conclusions about any one person except by evaluating him or her. Because folks do not know over 99.999999% of people in the world, their opinions of others are less shaped by facts than stereotypes and knee-jerk preconceptions so common in the Internet age in which people are often judged and labeled after reading something they wrote or someone said about them; even if it were true, it would constitute less than 0.000001% of their lives. And the worst 0.000001% of your life? It's not there; you are perfect, right?

These snap judgments are reinforced because by overlooking our flaws and focusing on those of others, we feel better about ourselves, courtesy of the tall poppy syndrome and the crab mentality: tear others down, you rise in comparison. It's why Plain Janes are often so quick to nitpick the flaws—beauty and otherwise—of beautiful women, and why businesspeople are reluctant to admit their competitors or outsiders may have better ideas.

Parallels of this are so woven throughout our culture it isn't practical to magically erase them, so as with racism, the best solution is to stop playing games, forthrightly admit there is a problem that needs solving, and counter it by putting ourselves in the shoes of others, empathetically asking ourselves how we would feel if the shoe was on the other foot.

This clearly was never done by the adults I knew as a child who habitually spoke of blacks disparagingly, sometimes advocating their mass murder as if it were so obviously justified one need never explain why. They wouldn't feel the same if they knew they were black—and they are. We're all one big family, as I explained in Erase Racism in One Minute with Two Antidotes, all related even if we have different skin color.

Related topics

Another patient raped by a paramedic?

Killing Black Patients and Raping Others: Exposing the Abuse

Erase Racism in One Minute with Two Antidotes

Lie detectors for uncovering racism and sociopathy in healthcare providers

EMS workers 3 times more likely to experience mental health issues

Back to the main Question & Answer page

Search my ER sites:

My books

My products

Stop Burglars CD |

My web innovations:

MySpamSponge | Track-this.info | ContactMeFree | MyProfileWriter | Keyword list tool | Balance braces

ER-doctor.com:

Bookmark this site | Tell a friend