A hearing was held Monday as Broward prosecutors asked a judge to reconsider his decision to throw out the manslaughter case against a former Hollywood nursing home administrator charged in the deaths of multiple residents after Hurricane Irma.
Jorge Carballo, 65, was charged in the deaths of nine residents at the Rehabilitation Center of Hollywood Hills in 2017.
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WATCH HEREJudge John Murphy, in a ruling issued Friday, found that the Broward State Attorney’s case against Carballo was so weak and so lacking in evidence that no jury could properly convict him, even considering the evidence in a light most favorable to prosecutors.
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At Monday's hearing, prosecutors asked Murphy to let the case go to a jury. Defense attorneys argued that Murphy's decision on Friday was the final word and ended the case.
Murphy spent about an hour listening to arguments but ultimately denied prosecutors' motion to reconsider tossing out the case.
"We respectfully accept Judge Murphy’s decision, though we strongly disagree with much of the court’s findings and wish that a jury of Mr. Jorge Carballo’s peers had been allowed to reach a verdict," Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor said in a statement Monday. "The tragic deaths of 12 senior citizens who resided at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills in 2017 deeply shocked and affected our community. I pursued criminal charges related to nine of those deaths because I, and my prosecutors, firmly believed the evidence showed those deaths were the result of culpable negligence. I think we can all agree that all of us would want our family members to have been treated with much more care and concern. We respectfully accept the judge’s decision, though we strongly disagree with it. We thank the judge for giving both parties a fair and well-conducted trial."
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Electricity to the center's air conditioning system — but not the rest of the facility — went out when a fuse became dislodged atop an FP&L transformer pole when Irma hit on Sept. 10, 2017.
In the early morning of Wednesday, Sept. 13, residents started showing signs of distress and some died, prompting nursing supervisors from the adjacent Memorial Regional hospital to call for an evacuation.
The victims, ranging in age from 57 to 99, had body temperatures of up to 108 degrees, paramedics have reported.
Carballo was originally charged with 12 deaths, but three cases were dropped. If convicted, Carballo could have faced 15 years in prison.
In its motion, prosecutors argued that Carballo failed to order the patients evacuated to Memorial Regional Hospital, a large facility directly across the street that still had its air conditioning and that the jury was “entitled to conclude from the evidence that the defendant’s conduct constituted culpable negligence irrespective of foreseeability.”
They added that the decision to remove the patients from harm “is not a medical decision,” but one Carballo should have made as the administrator of the nursing home.
