The only ones getting rich are the attorneys. And the doctors.
A man was taken by ambulance to UAMS after an injury. There was nothing a hospital bed could do to help him heal. He wanted to go home.
UAMS said no.
Instead, they decided he would remain in one of the hospital’s most expensive rooms. UAMS says the room costs about $10,000 per night. For uninsured patients, they generously discount it to roughly $4,300 per night. Medicaid ultimately paid about $2,000 per night.
The injured man said, “No. Stop.”
It was too late.
Nurse Nathan Ernst had already injected him with fentanyl.
The patient had a severe reaction to the opioid. Not as severe as his brother’s reaction to a single dose of pharmaceutical methadone, which killed him, but severe nonetheless.
What happened during the next 13 hours may never be known.
The family was never contacted.
The surveillance footage was deleted.
When family members finally located him, they found him naked and restrained to a hospital cot.
Two weeks later, he was finally allowed to leave against medical advice.
UAMS and the doctors and nurses the man accuses of falsely imprisoning and battering him have refused to provide any compensation.
According to the lawsuit, they terrorized him, humiliated him, caused complete hearing loss in one ear, caused hyponatremia—possibly through cerebral salt wasting after dehydration—deprived him of sleep, starved him, and, during one escape attempt, slammed his head into a wall.
Then, after he left the hospital against medical advice and did not die at home, UAMS’s response was essentially: “See? We saved his life.”
The man is now suing.
No attorney has been willing to take on Arkansas’s highest-paid public employees, so he is representing himself.
The doctors, of course, have lawyers.
One of the firms representing them, Wright, Lindsey & Jennings LLP, sent notice that it intended to subpoena records from the man’s post-hospital employers.
The man moved to quash the subpoenas.
He is not seeking lost wages. The doctors and nurses who had possession of his phone and wallet while he was restrained in the ICU made no effort to locate his family. But now they wanted employment records.
They wanted to know whether he was a cheerful employee.
Whether he complained about PTSD.
Whether he talked about being treated worse than a prisoner of war for two weeks.
And, incidentally, the same people who attempted to generate a medical bill approaching his entire net worth also wanted access to his Social Security number.
After the motion to quash had been fully briefed, the attorneys agreed to remove the Social Security number request from the subpoenas. The motion was then withdrawn.
The first subpoena response arrived today.
The employer’s answer was simple: “0” records.
The man was hired through a temp agency.
Three days of work went into preparing and litigating the motion to quash. Then attorneys at a prominent law firm spent additional time preparing an opposition. The insurance company paid for the attorneys time.
What did anyone learn about what happened inside UAMS in 2024?
Nothing.
No new facts emerged.
No additional accountability was created.
No closer examination of the events occurred.
The only people who unquestionably benefited from all the work, filings, arguments, and billable hours were the lawyers.
They got paid.
Would You Trust These Doctors With Your Life? Hell No!
My son had the misfortune of being taken to the UAMS Emergency Department after suffering a head injury at work.
After a CT scan, Sean was told that surgery was not necessary, but the doctors wanted to keep him for observation. Their decision to admit him to the ICU was based, at least in part, on an error in the EMT’s paperwork.
The EMT reported that Sean had fallen 35 feet.
Sean did not look like someone who had fallen 35 feet. He did not act like someone who had fallen 35 feet. For a person to fall 35 feet and be in the condition Sean was in would have bordered on a miracle.
Yet none of the “brain surgeons” at UAMS thought to ask Sean how far he had actually fallen.
They did ask him about his pain level. Sean pointed to the “2” on the FACES pain scale.
For me, a 2 out of 10 is a stubbed toe. I imagine a 35-foot fall would feel more like a 15 out of 10.
Nevertheless, doctors earning well over half a million dollars a year decided Sean needed to remain in a room that costs approximately $10,000 per night for observation. They knew he had no insurance. They also mistakenly believed the expensive home where he was working belonged to him.
Sean said no.
Dr. Jordan Takasugi, Dr. Nolan Bruce, Dr. Natalie J. Applebaum, and Dr. Karrar Aljiboori were all involved in the decision to force Sean to stay. Without consent, without attempting to contact his family, and despite both verbal and physical resistance, the doctors caused Nurse Nathan Ernst to inject Sean with fentanyl.
UAMS destroyed the Emergency Room video recordings, leaving no reliable record of what happened next.
By the time Sean’s now ex-girlfriend found him the following day, he was naked and tied to a hospital bed.
There was no injury to his torso whatsoever. Why wasn’t he given shorts or pajama bottoms? Was it about control? Was it something worse?
The sedation and restraints continued for two weeks.
I did not fight harder for Sean’s release because I never saw him before the drugs were administered. Every person who spoke to me in Sean’s room insisted that UAMS had given him nothing stronger than acetaminophen for a headache.
That was not true.
The UAMS team told me my son might behave like a drugged 17-year-old for the rest of his life. They also told me he could die at any moment.
Arkansas law requires medical providers to obtain consent from the patient, an authorized surrogate, or a court before confining a patient, administering medication, or performing medical procedures. My understanding is that these requirements apply broadly, even to routine interventions such as blood pressure checks or Tylenol administration.
More than 82 UAMS staff members participated in Sean’s confinement. No petition was filed with a court. No counsel was appointed. No judicial process occurred.
When I objected, I was removed from Sean’s room.
When I attempted to record video, I was threatened with removal from the hospital.
Sean and I have now filed suit against UAMS and the employees we believe committed crimes against him. UAMS Police have refused to pursue criminal charges. UAMS also refused to provide addresses needed to serve the defendants.
We filed a motion requesting additional time to complete service. The motion was denied because the court ruled that we had not specifically documented our efforts to serve each defendant. Fortunately, the judge allowed us to refile.
That meant drafting 82 separate paragraphs, one for each defendant.
For example: “We requested the address of Dr. Elizabeth Brown, and UAMS refused to provide it unless we agreed to a protective order allowing UAMS to designate virtually any information it chose as confidential.”
Dr. Jennings Boyette and Dr. Sriram Navuluri, supported by others involved in Sean’s confinement, have asked the court to dismiss the claims against them because they were not served within the required time.
Their position appears to be this:
If hospital employees confine you, administer dangerous drugs against your will, and hold you without court authorization, they face no consequences unless you successfully navigate every procedural requirement necessary to sue them afterward.
They do not need to file a petition before taking your liberty.
They do not need to inform you of your rights.
They do not need to provide court-appointed counsel.
And they can still bill you for the treatment.
But if you seek compensation for the harm they caused, you had better file every document correctly, meet every deadline, and properly serve every defendant—or they will argue that your case should never be heard at all.
A Higher Law 