Another preview from the book

Lisa Baker at Saramaritan Hospital

The extraordinary story of an avoidable 

hospital death and the people who helped

 those responsible avoid accountability

By David Baker   

Posted July 13, 2026

   On the day after Lisa collapsed, members of Samaritan’s management would likely have held a meeting to examine Lisa’s medical chart.

   It wouldn’t have taken them long to see that Marie Martin, one of the nurses responsible for Lisa’s care in the hours before she was found unconscious and near death, had failed to follow the hospital’s written instructions for treating hypoglycemia - instructions that one of Lisa’s physicians had ordered with an entry in her chart the previous afternoon —  to be used if Lisa’s blood glucose level fell below 60 mg/dL. The people at that meeting would know from a single page in the chart that the hospital was responsible for the horrific injuries to a patient who was scheduled to go home that day but instead was in the hospital’s ICU on life support.

   They also would have seen that Maryann Lee, the nurse who took over Lisa’s care from nurse Martin, apparently had not examined Lisa’s chart, or conferred with the nurse she was replacing. — a  routine proceedure called “taking report.”  If she had, she would have known that one of her patients was at serious risk. As it was, she didn’t check on Lisa for over two hours, and then only when a low-heart rate monitor alarm sounded and she called a code after finding Lisa near death. 

   Now those managers had a decision to make.

   They could have decided on full disclosure; explaining what had happened and assuring me that steps would be taken to prevent it ever happening to someone else. 

   But that’s not what the cruel, callous members of the Catholic-based Samaritan Hospital’s management did. Instead, they immediately began a coverup, removing from Lisa’s chart pages documenting the treatment she received in the hours before she was found near death, and stonewalling my questions about what had happened. 

  So later, with a lawsuit pending, Samaritan’s managers were desperate to avoid responsible for Lisa’s catastrophic injuries and subsequent death.

   How desperate? So desperate that the defendants lawyers apparently conspired with high-profile Albany attorney Stephen Coffey to get the case thrown out. This was after attorney Cynthia LaFave, who was representing me but had abandoned the case without telling me.

    Now I was trying to find another  attorney. Nobody wanted it.   Then Coffey, who’s firm, O’Connell & Aronowitz, had already declined the case, called me, offering to review the file with a view to assuming representation. It seemed too good to be true. 

   It was. What Coffey and his colleague Brendan Tully actually did, in a gross violation of legal ethics, was to try and run out the clock so that a motion by the defendants’ lawyers to dismiss the case for failure to prosecute would be granted.

  The judge had instructed Coffey to a send letter to the court, with copies to the defendants’ attorneys, stating that he was considering taking the case. Coffey didn’t send the letter until after a deadline imposed by the judge had passed. The case was not dismissed but only because I filed an affidavit saying I would represent myself — something Tully, in a phone call the day before the deadline, tried to persuade me not to do. 

   How desperate? So desperate that they paid Matthew Leinung, a doctor at Albany Medical Center Hospital, to claim in an affidavit that nurses who ignored the hospital’s printed instructions on treating hypoglycemia did not fall below the standard of care, and, without citing any evidence, that Lisa’s glucose level when she was was found near death was a safe 80 mg/dL, not the near-zero level recorded by nurse Lee in the chart.

   How desperate? So desperate that they withheld at least two documents; the one from Lisa’s chart created by nurse Marie Martin in the hours before Lisa was found nearly dead and another one, called a ‘consultation note’, that would have been dictated by Dr. Rajinder Jain - a diabetes specialist who had ordered the printed hypoglycemia protocol to be used - and who was heard the morning after Lisa collapsed loudly proclaiming that what had happened to Lisa was all the fault of  “the stupid nurses.” If Jain had expressed any such opinion in a final consultation note the case would likely have been over. The hospital would have lost.

   Jain stated under oath that he didn’t dictate any consultation notes about Lisa’s care. Several months later, one of the notes he “didn’t dictate” showed up in a second copy of Lisa’s chart.

    How desperate? So desperate that the defendants’ lawyers repeatedly claimed that Lisa and were divorced when the lawsuit was filed - which would have meant I would not have been illegible to file the claim.

    Married in 1985, we were never divorced.

   How desperate? So desperate that Kathleen Ryan, one of the hospital’s attorneys, flat-out lied to me, saying  the hospital’s malpractice insurance carrier wanted to settle the case, but first needed to do a “review’ of  the medical records, — records that had been in its possession for three years. What she really was doing for several months was searching for an unscrupulous, ethics-free doctor who could be paid to explain away the gross negligence documented in Lisa’s chart. She eventually found one — Matthew Leinung  — who submitted the affidavit described above. Which got my claim dismissed. 

   Lying. Withholding documents. All in a day’s work for an attorney representing a hospital management desperate to deny its documented responsibility for the horrific and totally avoidable death of one of its patients.