Coral Gables Hospital Tosses Mans Leg Out with the Trash

Hospitals tend to make people nervous. When you go to the hospital, you expect to be treated in a safe, professional environment. Going to the hospital for any procedure can induce anxiety, but when it’s a major procedure, it’s even worse.

Of course, you know that you are dealing with a well-trained, experienced staff of doctors, nurses, orderlies, etc., and most of the time things will turn out as planned. That’s how it should be. However, that’s not always the case, is it?

What Happened to the Leg?

Take what happened at Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables, Florida. In October of 2014, a man named John Timiriasieff, 56, went into the hospital to have his right leg amputated below the knee. According to the law, the body part is supposed to be disposed of according to the regulations of Florida law.

In this instance, the personnel at the hospital did not properly dispose of the body. According to the lawsuit that was filed, the leg was thrown into the garbage, and it still included the tag that bore the patient’s name.

Timiriasieff had no idea this had happened at the time. However, about a month later, his family was contacted by homicide detectives. They were investigating what they thought was potentially a man’s death and wanted to know if Timiriasieff was the victim of foul play. They had found his leg at a waste management facility, and it still had the patient’s name attached.

Naturally, the family was bewildered and wondered what could have happened and how the leg ended up where it did. They went to the hospital to find out more information, but the hospital would not provide any details.

Timiriasieff filed a lawsuit against the hospital, claiming that he had suffered emotional distress, embarrassment, humiliation, and an invasion of privacy because of what had happened. The patient was upset that the hospital had failed to protect his private information, and that they were not willing to accept responsibility for what had happened. The lawsuit claimed that the conduct of the hospital was “outrageous and beyond the bounds of human decency”, and really, that’s putting it nicely.

There was no explanation as to how this type of mishap could have occurred, but it’s certainly a black eye against the hospital. It shows that the staff was not properly following the rules and regulations. The hospital said that they addressed the situation and that all of the proper procedures have been reinforced, so something similar doesn’t happen in the future.

While that might be a step in the right direction, it doesn’t do much to help allay the fears that others might have when they have to go to a hospital for a similar procedure.

More Missing Bodies

This isn’t the first time that body parts ended up in the wrong place in Florida. In 2020, a Florida couple sued St. Joseph’s Hospital, which they claimed had lost the body of their infant son who had died just three days after he was born. That suit accused the hospital of recklessness and negligent infliction of emotional distress. The hospital said that they investigated and were cooperative in search efforts to find the body. However, it was never found.

In 2011, there was a suit filed against a firefighter/paramedic who took a man’s foot and leg from the scene of a vehicle crash in 2008. Cynthia Economou admitted to taking the man’s foot and claimed that she was going to use it to train a body-recovery dog. There’s a lot of strangeness out there.