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Two families are suing a Washington state hospital after one family removed a loved one from life support — only to later find out that the man who died was actually their loved one’s roommate.
The bizarre case of mistaken identity occurred in August 2021 at PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in Vancouver, Washington, according to the lawsuit obtained by Law&Crime. Weeks earlier, on Aug. 8, 2021, 69-year-old David Wells choked on a piece of steak while eating at the group home where he lived. His roommate, Michael Beehler, called 911, and paramedics rushed Wells to the hospital where he was declared brain-dead and put on life support.
But the hospital identified Wells incorrectly, and he was put into the hospital’s system instead under Beehler’s name.
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“PeaceHealth called Plaintiff Beehler’s sister, Plaintiff Debbie Danielson, and forced her to make a life-or-death decision to keep her brother on or take him off life support,” said the lawsuit, filed last month in Clark County Superior Court. “Plaintiff Danielson made the difficult choice to terminate life support for Mr. Wells, believing him to be her brother.”
Danielson spent the next few days alerting other family members of her brother’s death and planning a funeral. There was even a death notice in the local newspaper saying Beehler had died at the age of 60.
But a few days later she made a “shocking discovery,” the lawsuit says: her brother was still very much alive — and on the other end of a phone call.
“I said, ‘You can’t be alive. You’re dead!”” Danielson told Portland, Oregon, NBC affiliate KGW, which first reported about the incident last year.
Authorities retrieved the body from the funeral home and confirmed it to be Wells. The revelation stunned Beehler’s family. And while they were relieved Beehler was still alive, they felt guilty.
“We made life-ending decisions for a person we don’t even know,” Danielson’s husband, Gary Danielson, told KGW.
Thinking back on it, however, Greg Danielson he thought it was odd when the funeral home didn’t require them to identify Beehler’s “body.”
“When we went to the funeral director, I was like, ‘Don’t we need to identify him?’ ‘No, we’ll just take it from here,’” he told the outlet.
Beehler was especially befuddled.
“He’s dead, and I’m supposed to be dead. Who knows what’s going on,” he said in an interview with KGW.
“It’s disturbing. I don’t know if I’m going to get over it. They dropped the ball so egregiously,” Shawn Wells, who also is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, told the outlet.
The lawsuit is accusing the hospital of negligence, alleging its workers “violated their duty” and “breached the applicable standards.”
“Plaintiffs suffered severe emotional distress as a direct result of Defendant’s extreme and outrageous conduct,” the suit says.
In a response filed Dec. 23, the hospital denied the allegations.
“PeaceHealth has worked diligently to strengthen our patient identification processes, along with our continued collaboration with multiple community agencies involved in healthcare, including EMS,” the hospital said in a statement shared with KGW. “Given that PeaceHealth is involved in litigation, it is unfortunate we are unable to share more facts about this situation.”
A state investigation into the matter revealed the mix-up started when Beehler gave his own identification to paramedics instead of his roommate’s. A hospital registrar then identified the patient with Beehler’s ID and entered it into the system without following hospital policy that requires a second identifier, according to the state.
Investigators also noted that Beehler’s next of kin declined to go to the hospital to identify the body.
PeaceHealth staff was given remedial education and the case was closed after the state determined the hospital resolved the issue, the report said.
The families also filed a separate suit against the emergency medical services company, the county medical examiner and funeral home.
