Dallas Jury Awards $21 Million After Anesthesia Negligence Left a 27-Year-Old in a Permanent Vegetative State

In October 2017, Carlos David Castro Rojas, then 27, was working odd jobs in Dallas -- including hanging Christmas lights -- when he fell from a ladder and fractured his left tibia. The injury required surgery under general anesthesia at Baylor University Medical Center, a procedure expected to last about two hours. He never recovered.

During the operation, Rojas lost dangerous amounts of blood pressure. Two nurse anesthetists administered multiple doses of medication to raise it, yet the handwritten anesthesia record showed no serious blood pressure abnormalities, which the plaintiffs' experts described as inconsistent with the treatment that was actually given. The electronic monitoring record that would have settled the question was never preserved by the hospital. The certified registered nurse anesthetist responsible for Rojas, Casey Martin, also left the operating room for approximately 12 minutes during the procedure. Rojas emerged from surgery in a vegetative state, a condition his medical team attributed to hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy -- permanent brain damage from prolonged oxygen deprivation.

Charla Aldous, of AldousWalker, co-tried the case alongside Bruce Steckler of Steckler Wayne. The plaintiffs sued U.S. Anesthesia Partners of Texas, nurse anesthetist Casey Martin, supervising physician Mallorie Cline, and Baylor University Medical Center. At trial, the legal team argued that Rojas's blood pressure fell to a level that cut off adequate oxygen to his brain, that providers failed to respond quickly enough, and that the paper record was created after the fact to obscure the timeline.

Baylor's own head of anesthesia testified that continuous brain-activity monitoring was standard practice at the hospital during such procedures. Records showed that monitoring was not performed for Rojas. The combination of an absent anesthetist, unaddressed blood pressure collapse, missing electronic data, and a disputed handwritten log formed the core of the negligence case the jury heard.

After deliberating, the Dallas County jury awarded $21.1 million, including $8 million specifically designated for the cost of Rojas's lifetime care. By 2022, he was 32 years old and had spent five years in a vegetative state, unable to communicate or perform basic functions. U.S. Anesthesia Partners stated after the verdict that it intended to appeal and maintained that its clinicians had provided appropriate care. No post-verdict reduction had been publicly reported at the time of filing.