$9.5 Million Settlement After Tripler Army Hospital Surgeons Reattached Intestine Backward, Triggering Locked-In Syndrome and Death

Julie Bond was 31 years old, the wife of former Army Staff Sgt. Donald Bond and the mother of three children, when a Schofield Barracks physician referred her to Tripler Army Medical Center's bariatric surgery program in November 2020. The planned procedure was a laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, a standard weight-loss operation performed routinely at the Honolulu military hospital.

During the surgery, the operating team reattached Bond's small intestine backward. The error reversed the normal direction of digestive flow and, left undetected, produced an intestinal hernia within three days. A second emergency operation was required to address the hernia, and during that procedure, anesthetists damaged her lungs. Blood clots formed next, a serious but typically treatable complication.

When physicians needed to remove the clots, the thrombectomy machine at Tripler was out of service. The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu was willing to accept Bond and perform the extraction. Her doctors chose a different path: they administered tPA, a clot-dissolving drug that carries a risk of uncontrolled bleeding. The medication caused micro-hemorrhages throughout her brain.

Bond fell into a coma. When she regained awareness, she had developed locked-in syndrome, meaning she was fully conscious but unable to move, speak, or breathe without a ventilator. She remained in that state until she died from sepsis on December 16, 2020, six weeks after the original gastric bypass.

Davis Levin Livingston attorney Loretta A. Sheehan filed suit against the United States government on behalf of Bond's estate and surviving family. Cases against military hospitals proceed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which routes claims through U.S. District Court and requires the government to stand in place of the treating physicians. The complaint traced the specific chain of decisions that compounded the initial surgical error: the delayed recognition of the backward anastomosis, the failure to transfer Bond to a facility with working equipment, and the choice of tPA over mechanical clot removal.

The government agreed to settle for $9.5 million. The settlement was announced in January 2024 and is paid to Donald Bond and the couple's three children.