Subject:  Fired nurse hires Fieger's firm |
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Chris
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Date Posted: 04/ 1/06 4:52pm
Fired nurse hires Fieger's firm
She says firing followed her delivery of inmate's baby
PUBLISHED: March 31, 2006
By Chad Halcom
Macomb Daily Staff Writer
A nurse fired from the Macomb County Jail has retained the law firm of Geoffrey Fieger for a possible lawsuit against her employer, in connection to a baby she delivered at the jail.
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Lori Helhowski, a nurse who last month performed the first live birth delivery to an inmate in the jail's history, said she has decided to go ahead with civil action over her dismissal. She said the Fieger law firm in Southfield is helping her prepare a case of wrongful retaliation and violation of whistle-blower protection laws.
"My son begged me not to even pursue this, but I feel obligated to pursue it for the sake of the inmates," Helhowski said of her legal action. "I just don't even believe it."
Helhowski was terminated March 20 as an employee of St. Louis-based Correctional Medical Services, or CMS, a private company under contract to provide medical services at the jail.
Although her termination is ostensibly linked to a personal relationship she developed with former jail inmate Shawn Jefferson, she and an attorney handling her case have both noted that Jefferson was no longer at the jail when her employer became aware of the situation. Helhowski believes her discharge was really connected to concerns she raised at the jail about proper care for the inmate and her baby.
Attorney Arnie Matusz, who represents Helhowski, said Thursday the timing of her dismissal is questionable since the inmate was long gone. Matusz said he is helping her prepare a case, but there are already some obstacles facing him.
For one thing, his client cannot reveal names of people he needs to locate for the case because of her own ethics as a nurse and patient privacy laws.
"There are potential vital witnesses for us to locate, but she can't reveal their identities to us. So we are aware of some factual scenarios, some events, but no names," Matusz said. "So we expect and hope some of that information will have to be given to us in discovery (information sharing)."
Helhowski and two other nurses on the night shift had arrived to begin their shift around 7:30 p.m. Feb. 27, to hear the noises of a young inmate at the jail crying or in pain from labor. The young mother, jailed at the time on a prostitution-related charge, delivered a healthy boy weighing seven pounds, 13 ounces.
Mother and baby were later transported by 8:25 that evening to Mount Clemens General Hospital, and Helhowski has said she voiced concerns to her superiors that the emergency delivery may have been necessary because the labor pains had gone unheeded before the night nurses arrived.
Her superiors at CMS terminated her employment a few weeks later, after they apparently became aware Helhowski had made phone calls from her home, on her personal time, to former inmate Shawn Jefferson, 44, of Clinton Township.
Jefferson was at the jail from roughly October through February on a cocaine possession charge. She has said she was a friend of one of his relatives, and the two became "close" while he was incarcerated. Helhowski was hired in November.
Although she has insisted she spent no time alone with Jefferson and violated no laws, jail and CMS officials have said employees like Helhowski have a "duty to inform" the jail chain of command about a relationship.
Macomb County Corporation Counsel George Brumbaugh, who represents the county in most standard civil matters, said he has limited knowledge of the Helhowski matter but sees no reason why the county should fear any lawsuit from her.
"The county didn't do anything. We are not the people who released her (from employment)," Brumbaugh noted.
A jail administrator has said it would be "a good assumption" that any information CMS received on a connection between a nurse and an inmate would have come from the jail staff itself. But Brumbaugh said even if county employees did pass along the information CMS used as grounds to dismiss Helhowski it wouldn't matter.
"Passing along factual information? No, I don't see how that exposes us to any liability," he said.
Documents obtained by The Macomb Daily in the Helhowski case under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act shed very little light on Helhowski's employment, since she was not actually an employee of a government agency.
But the records did include an employment policy that indicates jail staff could be terminated for "conduct unbecoming an officer or any member ... which tends to bring discredit to the Macomb County Sheriff's Office."
A CMS employment policy also states the company employees should not cultivate personal relationships that include phone calls, and the policy doesn't differentiate between work time and personal time.
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