Wednesday, March 12, 2025

CHARGES IN OXYGEN CHAMBER DEATH

By Bob Walsh

 

FILE - A hyperbaric chamber at the Oxford Center in Brighton, Mich., is shown Feb. 8, 2024. (David Guralnick/Detroit News via AP, file)

Regular readers will remember I wrote recently about a five-year old boy in the Detroit area who was burned to death in a medical oxygen chamber.  Yesterday four people were charged criminally in the death, which also injured the boy's mother.

The chief executive and founder of the Oxford Center in Brighton, Michigan, Tamela Peterson, 58, has been charged with second-degree murder.  The facility manager, Gary Marken, 56, and safety manager Gary Mosteller, 64, have been charged with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.
The person operating the chamber, Aleta Moffitt, 60, has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and intentionally placing false information on a medical records chart.

They all entered not guilty pleas today before the Troy District Court in front of Magistrate Elizabeth Chiappelli.

I do not have enough technical know-how to fully appreciate what went wrong, but I do know that killing five-year olds in a medical device is wrong and should not happen.  Oxygen rich environments are highly susceptible to such things and somebody almost certainly failed to do something that would ahve prevented this tragedy.

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