M4PNews| DENVER
A former patient of Denver Health filed a lawsuit Friday against the hospital claiming she was raped while recovering from a brain injury.
The woman, mostly incoherent after coming out of a coma she was put in after suffering a traumatic brain injury, alleges she was raped by an unknown man during her stay at the hospital in 2016.
Attorneys for the woman filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court of Colorado despite a Denver Police investigation that failed to conclude a crime was committed based on lab results. However, her attorneys say they are unfamiliar with the extent of the police investigation and look forward to proving their case.
Denver7 is not currently naming the plaintiff in the case, as she alleges she is the victim of a sexual assault.
The woman had been in a car crash on July 21, 2016 and was in a coma for 43 days afterward at Denver Health, according to the suit.
On Sept. 16, the woman was “incoherent, would drift out of consciousness, and was unable to make sense of where she was or what was happening to her,” the suit says.
Her husband visited her that morning, and around 7:30 p.m. that evening, a new registered nurse took over care of the woman for the evening. Two hours later, one of the woman’s nurses alerted the woman’s doctor that the woman “had redness in her groin area,” according to the lawsuit.
The doctor said the day team would check the woman’s groin area out the next day, and the woman’s husband was notified of her status that night, according to the lawsuit.
The next day, the suit says, the woman’s urine from a catheter bag was sent to a lab for a urinalysis. When the results came back two days later, on Sept. 19, it showed there was semen in her urine, according to the lawsuit.
Denver Health’s Risk Management team and the Denver Police Department were notified that semen had been found in the woman’s urine and were called in to investigate. Risk Management tried to interview the woman, but the lawsuit says she was “unable to provide coherent information” because of her brain injury.
They also interviewed her husband, who said he had not had relations with his wife for more than a year beforehand.