‘Let’s start with what’s going on with your job and after we can talk about David,’ said Virginia.
Angela brought her therapist up to speed on the many challenges she was facing at the hospital with managing the staff, the board, the patients and the police. Virginia gave Angela gentle suggestions for coping with her new set of challenges.
‘How about trying it this way,’ said the therapist, leaning forward. ‘Rather than looking at it as one giant insurmountable problem—and don’t get me wrong, it is most definitely a biggie—try breaking everything into small pieces and manage each one individually. You’ll find it more expedient and easier to accomplish small goals.’
Angela nodded dutifully.
‘Now, what’s going on with your husband?’ the therapist asked.
‘Nothing, that’s the whole problem.’
‘Can you give me a little more?’
‘He’s the same only it’s getting worse. It feels like it’s been going on for so long,’ said Angela. ‘I go to work and he doesn’t do anything all day. He hasn’t written a word in years except for an occasional corporate freelance project and even those have dried up because he doesn’t meet deadlines. He’s been gambling and losing money at the casinos after he’s promised me he’d stop. He might as well flush our money down the toilet or set it on fire. Some months, I can barely pay our bills and I’m a freaking doctor.’
‘Do you still love him?’
‘I’m still in love with Professor David Crawford, the man I met in college. David the novelist, the jokester, the confident guy who was going to take on the world and win a Nobel Prize for literature. Every girl I went to college with had a crush on him and he chose me. But the man I have now is so different from the one I married.’
‘You think the old David is still in there?’
‘I thought if I gave him enough support, everything would eventually come together and he’d be able to start writing again. His writing was how he defined himself. Without that identity, he’s blowing aimlessly in the wind.’
Virginia nodded in support. ‘Perhaps he peaked too soon having a best-selling novel in his early twenties. Sometimes, success too early and too fast overwhelms people and sends them down the wrong path. It’s hard to top a meteoric juggernaut that one achieved at twenty-four.’
‘That’s what I think, too,’ said Angela. ‘When his second book tanked, people in the publishing industry stopped calling and he lost his mojo. Add to that, all the years of stress, with us trying to have a baby. My husband really wanted to be a dad. I think he’s still really sad that he’s not. Being a father would have given him the purpose that he seems to be missing.’
‘We’ve talked about this before. You still won’t consider adoption?’
Angela looked at her therapist with resolve and shook her head. ‘You know why I don’t want to. My brother and I were adopted and it was hell for my parents after my brother started to lose it. When you adopt you don’t know what kind of gene pool you’re fishing in. I won’t put myself through that.’
24
Day 5
As Beckmann had ordered, the next morning Angela called an all-hands meeting of Oceanside Manor staff and carefully explained the particulars of the miraculous birth and the baby that now resided on 3 West. She answered dozens of questions and tried to rally her troops and put their concerns to rest. Getting teary as she spoke, she committed herself and the hospital to rooting out the problem and putting new procedures in place to make sure nothing like this would ever happen again.
‘There is no place for something like this in our facility,’ said Angela. ‘Families entrust the care and well-being of their loved ones to us and we cannot fall short. Right now, we need to make things right so our families regain the confidence in Oceanside Manor that they once had. We’ll all be under a lot of scrutiny and stress for the next few weeks. I’d like to ask each of you to co-operate fully with the police and provide them with whatever they need so we can put this awful situation behind us. We will get to the bottom of this, I promise you.’
‘What do we tell the families of the other patients?’ asked a nurse. ‘There are going to be a lot of questions.’
‘That’s being handled,’ said Angela calmly. ‘The hospital attorneys and I have been reaching out to the families privately by phone. A letter is being sent out from the board to each family by email as we speak. Please refer all questions from patient families or their attorneys to me.’
Working with their PR agency, the following press release was sent out over the wires.
For Immediate Release.
Contact: Dr. Angela Crawford, MD, Acting Administrator, Oceanside Manor
Email: [email protected]
OCEANSIDE MEDICAL CENTER/ OCEANSIDE MANOR
POLICE INVESTIGATION UPDATE
Oceanside Manor, affiliated with Oceanside Medical Center, has been in business for close to 25 years, and has an unblemished reputation for providing high-quality care for our patients. Our patients’ health and safety are always our first priority. We are proud of our long history in caring for the intellectually and developmentally disabled.
Recently, we became aware of an incident regarding the health and safety of one of our residents. We have taken steps to review our systems, protocols and staff to make sure that all of our patients are getting the safest and best possible care. We strive for excellence in patient care and offer our profound apologies to all of our families, our clients/patients/residents, to the community and our agency partners.
As soon as we were made aware of the problem, we gave our full cooperation to the Oceanside Police Department and will continue to work with investigators in every way possible.
We have increased security measures to ensure the safety of all our patients and are in the process of reviewing and improving what is already an in-depth vetting process for caregivers at Oceanside Medical Center and Oceanside Manor. Mistreatment or assault of a patient in our care will not be tolerated. Every patient is entitled to and deserves a safe environment.
A copy of the Oceanside Manor press release was forwarded from the newspaper’s editor to Tommy Devlin. The reporter had ignored his beeping phone because he was in the middle of schmoozing one of the young female police officers he had cornered outside the police headquarters building.
‘What’s going on over at Oceanside Manor,’ said Devlin. ‘My gut is screaming right now.’
The officer remained silent and simply stared back at the persistent reporter.
‘C’mon, Janice. How long have we known each other?’ said Devlin, laying it on thick.
‘About a month,’ said the policewoman, looking around for another cop to rescue her.
‘Exactly. We’re practically family,’ he replied with a grin.
The female police officer smirked. Everyone in the Oceanside PD knew Devlin. He was relentless, and sometimes abrasive but he made up for it by being occasionally entertaining. It was common knowledge there was nothing he wouldn’t say if he thought it would get him the story.
‘I’m not at liberty to talk about it,’ said the cop. ‘You’re going to have to wait like everyone else.’
‘C’mon, Janice, help out a fellow Irishman,’ he said.
‘I’m Italian.’
‘Irish, Italian, same thing. My people came here because of a potato famine and yours because of a pasta famine,’ he said with a hopeful grin as he reached for the vibrating phone in his pocket. Looking at the screen, he quickly scanned the press release from Oceanside Manor that had just been sent to him.
‘Holy shit,’ said Devlin as he read. ‘What the hell does this mean? Assault of a patient? Isn’t everyone at Oceanside Manor totally out of it?’ The reporter looked up at the officer’s face and tried to read it.
‘Don’t look at me,’ she said, backing away, her hands in the air. ‘If you want information, talk to the chief. I’ll have my head handed to me if I open my mouth.’
‘Th
ey put out a press release, it’s all public now. So, you can tell me.’
‘Nice try, Devlin. You’re an investigative reporter. Go investigate,’ said the police officer as she turned and walked back into the station.
Devlin ran across the street, jumped into his car and raced back to the Oceanside Manor building as fast as possible. This was going to be big.
25
After a long afternoon hanging around the hospital parking lot, Tommy was only able to gather crumbs of benign information that the hospital administration and the police would divulge. Somehow, he pieced together a story for the morning edition of the paper.
WOMAN IN 12 YEAR COMA HAS BABY
By Thomas Devlin, Jr.
After an unprecedented breach of security, police investigators have begun to gather DNA from all male parties who worked for or visited the Oceanside Medical/Oceanside Manor extended-care facility, where a twenty-one-year-old woman who has been in a vegetative state for almost twelve years, gave birth to a healthy baby boy last week.
A spokesperson from the Oceanside Police said Wednesday that the woman and child, who was delivered on January 13, remain in the hospital and both are in good condition and that ‘the sexual assault investigation will likely take some time.’
‘This is not a simple process,’ said Mayor Tim Davidson. ‘This crime happened over an extended time period and there are a large number of individuals that need to be vetted. The police department has had to cast a very wide net.’
The police would not comment further on whether anyone had been asked for DNA samples.
The woman in question, has been a patient at Oceanside Manor since 2005, according to court records. It has been reported that she entered the facility after a catastrophic car accident on the Florida Turnpike outside of Orlando that killed both of her parents and her twin sister. The accident left the mother of the baby in a permanent vegetative state. The woman has no other relatives.
Board President of Oceanside Manor, Robert Beckmann, would not take phone calls but directed people to a hospital spokesperson, Acting Facility Administrator, Angela Crawford, for further information.
‘Oceanside Manor will do everything in our power to help uncover the full accounting of this horrifying situation. This has devastated everyone involved, from the victim to our own hospital staff,’ said Angela Crawford, MD. ‘I want to assure our families and the public, we will get to the bottom of this situation.’
When Tommy Devlin’s story went out onto the wires, it was picked up by every national and international news organization within an hour. Cable shows grabbed it and for the first time in months, the relentless bi-partisan political in-fighting that had become a staple of the evening news was pushed to the back burner. Eliza and her baby were front page in every national newspaper. She was the lead story on the radio, TV, and internet. The birth was the topic of conversation in company lunchrooms, on social media and at cocktail parties. Tommy Devlin himself was even interviewed by national news shows as the ‘local reporter on the ground in Oceanside.’ There was talk of Devlin appearing on CNN. In a nutshell—the story went viral in a nuclear way. Eliza Stern and her baby were in the dead center of a conversation happening around the world and everyone asked the same question in different languages—what kind of person would do something like that?
Devlin didn’t really care one way or the other who or why someone would have sex with an unconscious woman. It was irrelevant to him. What mattered was that he was now at the center of the news universe. People around the world wanted to know his opinion about what had happened and he planned to milk the story for all it was worth. From his vantage point, Eliza Stern and her baby had become his golden goose. He laughed when he thought of the irony of it all. Some guy got his rocks off with a comatose woman and Devlin might very well end up on CNN. His whole life was about to change and he figured he had Eliza Stern and a yet unknown pervert, to thank for all of it. The world works in mysterious ways, he chuckled to himself as he returned a call from Reuters.
26
Day 6
A few days into the investigation, McQuillan and Blalock had come to a mutual conclusion on how to proceed. It became apparent that the only way they were going to find the person who raped Eliza Stern was to get a DNA sample from every male who had set foot in Oceanside Manor over a three-month period the year before. It was probably a wider range than necessary but if there was the slightest possibility that the conception calculations were off, they expanded the time, just to be on the safe side.
‘Even so,’ said Blade, ‘some nut job could have gotten in through an improper channel and there may be no record of him at all. Seems to me, if I was going to do something like this, I’d want to remain invisible so there would be no record of my presence.’
‘It’s possible our perp snuck in undetected,’ said McQ, ‘but right now we’ve got a partial working-list of seventy-three males who we know for sure were in the building during that period of time. There are still more names to vet but let’s swab the ones we’ve got and see what crawls out. If we’re lucky, one of them is the baby daddy and we can stop looking for that needle in a haystack.’
‘Legally, they don’t have to give us their DNA,’ said Blade.
‘I know that, and you know that, but I’m hoping most of them don’t know that.’
‘If I were the baby daddy, I wouldn’t give my DNA up. But, I guess for the guys who are employed here,’ said Blade, ‘it would look really bad if they didn’t. If they’re innocent, they should naturally want to do the swab and clear themselves.’
‘From your mouth to God’s ears,’ said McQ with a knowing smile.
Later that day, an Oceanside police team was assembled to methodically take all samples from those willing to give it. A line of men in all shapes and sizes formed in the hallway by the conference rooms being used by the police. The line was so long it twisted around the corner.
One by one, each man stepped into a small private room, the door was closed and cells were gently scraped from inside their cheek, collected, bagged and labeled. It took a few hours but the officers worked efficiently and without much conversation in order to get a job of this magnitude completed and samples off to the Palm Beach County police lab.
Until the investigation was over, no one other than hospital staff and immediate family members of patients were allowed into the facility for any reason. All deliveries and ‘other business,’ would be conducted and logged in the lobby. While things were surprisingly orderly inside the Oceanside Manor building, outside it was pure pandemonium. It had only been a few hours since Tommy Devlin’s story broke. His front-page article was the catalyst triggering the global media world’s descent on the normally sleepy Oceanside. Reporters and news crews ten deep camped out on all the main streets in town. Local residents were annoyed their town had become overcrowded, while the restaurants, bars and delis were delighted. For some entrepreneurs, this ‘immaculate conception’ at Oceanside Manor was great for business.
News of the baby had spread like wildfire within the walls of Oceanside Manor and throughout their sister hospital, Oceanside Medical. Nurses and doctors from all departments stopped by the room to see the tiny baby the world was so curious about. As Angela had mandated, the child received 24/7 care and was rarely put down, falling asleep in the arms of one nurse or another. The hospital staff had decorated the room. Many brought in baby things they had at home and created a mini-nursery in Eliza’s room. Colorful animal decals were placed on the wall next to the baby’s bassinet and a musical mobile hung over the crib. Stuffed animals of every shape and size lined the walls of the room and soft twinkling music played in the background. A rocker and a changing table had been moved into the room and fully stocked with diapers and lotions. The staff even fought over who got to hold or feed the newborn on any given hour. Outside the hospital, a steady stream of flowers and baby toys piled up near the front entrance from well-wishers and lookey-loos. Oceanside Manor had b
ecome a media and tourist mecca and the tiny baby boy was the star attraction.
Even Angela, despite all the stress, found herself over on 3 West taking her turn at feeding the infant, who the hospital staff had already nicknamed, Eli, after the baby’s mother. While the country and the world’s fascination with the scandal grew, Eliza Stern lay nearby, motionless, as strangers fed her son.
When Angela took her turn to hold and feed the baby she looked carefully at his tiny head. It had only been six days since the little boy was born but he already looked so different from that first day. When he first came out, he had just a little fuzz on his head but already more was coming in. She smiled at him. Look how nice and chubby you are now. Your face has changed. You are a beautiful boy.
She gazed down at the infant in her arms and wondered what it would be like to have a child in her own home. She had thought those maternal feelings had vanished after all the years she and David had tried to have a child. Now, holding him and contemplating all she had been through, feelings stirred inside of her.
That evening when Angela left the building to go home, she had to fight her way through throngs of reporters and cameras all clamoring to get a statement or picture from her. The hospital board and the company attorneys had been very specific about interactions with the press. There were not to be any, until there was some closure on what had happened.
‘You understand me, Angela?’ Bob Beckmann had said at an emergency offsite meeting of the board that she had been summoned to. ‘Say nothing to anyone. When you come in or out of the building, look straight ahead and walk. Don’t stop. Don’t smile. You’re a horse with blinders on. Clear?’
Without Her Consent Page 10
