A woman on the way to the hospital for a routine procedure died after the ambulance she was riding in is hit head on. Her daughters say their mother's life could have been saved if the situation had been taken more seriously.
At 9:30 PM Wednesday night the ambulance transporting Beverly Baker was traveling eastbound on SR-38 when a mini van heading northbound ran a stop sign and crashed into the ambulance, causing it to flip and roll into a ditch.
Beverly, who is a quadriplegic, was strapped to a gurney, but the impact of the crash caused the cot she was on to break.
"Mom ended up flipping and was still strapped to the gurney so she was on the floor with the gurney on top of her," said her daughter Jenny White.
Still when medics arrived they determined that Beverly was fine.
"We kind of go with our gut at the time and we go with the information of what the paramedics are telling us and what the officers are seeing at the scene, said Hamilton County Sheriff Mark Bowen.
Only their "gut" would be far from accurate.
Beverly was still taken to the hospital, but it wasn't a broken feeding tube that caught the doctor's attention.
"She had an hematoma with two blood clots and eight to 12 broken bones. She had broken legs and ribs and arms and shoulder blades," White remembered.
Beverly was rushed into surgery before her family could even get to the hospital. When she came out of surgery Beverly was comatose.
"She was not responding at all," remembered her daughter Rachel Bentley.
Three days later she died.
"This is a result of someone's carelessness," said Bentley. "In this case people made bad judgments and made bad calls."
Beverly's daughters are demanding answers. They feel that their mother's life could have been saved had her condition been looked at more closely and had the safety equipment inside the ambulance been working properly. But most of all they wish they could have had the opportunity to say goodbye.
"I think it's a little frustrating because we were not given correct information at the scene. That was really frustrating because had we had that we could have all been there before she went back to surgery and we could have all talked to her," Bentley added.
The sheriff's crash investigation team has since performed an accident reconstruction at the scene and the prosecutor is looking into whether or not charges against the driver of that mini van will be filed.
