$13.5 Million Verdict After ER Stroke Misdiagnosis Left Idaho Man With Permanent Brain Damage

Shortly after 4:00 a.m. on March 29, 2016, Colleen Moulton found her husband Carl Stiefel on the bathroom floor, vomiting, gripped by a severe headache, and growing more confused by the minute. She drove him to the emergency department, where he was examined within minutes of arriving. A CT scan completed around 5:15 a.m. came back with a finding the treating physician read as reassuring: no acute intracranial process. The doctor recorded a diagnosis of benign positional vertigo and arranged for Stiefel to be admitted for observation.

What the CT scan had missed was a dissection of the vertebral artery in Stiefel's neck. That torn artery was already triggering a posterior circulation stroke, and without clot-dissolving treatment, additional strokes in the posterior fossa followed over the next several hours. More than three hours passed before Stiefel was transferred to a room. He did not receive an MRI until 5:50 p.m., nearly 14 hours after he first walked through the emergency department doors. The MRI confirmed what had been happening all day.

By the time the correct diagnosis arrived, Stiefel had suffered irreversible brain damage. He was left permanently disabled and unable to work. The hospital and the radiology group resolved their claims before trial. The case proceeded against Emergency Medicine of Idaho and the emergency physician who had first examined Stiefel.

Eric Rossman of Rossman Law Group PLLC in Boise represented Stiefel and Moulton. At trial, the team used colorized CT scan films and detailed medical illustrations showing how the vertebral artery tear had set off a cascade of strokes and brain infarction, making the progression of harm visible to jurors. The central argument was not merely that the physician made a mistake, but that the failure to act on plainly available evidence crossed from negligence into reckless disregard for the standard of care.

The Ada County jury agreed. Its verdict totaled $13.5 million, the second-largest medical malpractice jury award in Idaho history. Critically, the jury found that the conduct of the emergency physician and Emergency Medicine of Idaho constituted reckless misconduct. That finding mattered under Idaho law: the state caps noneconomic damages at roughly $400,000 in medical malpractice cases, but the cap does not apply when a jury determines the harm arose from willful or reckless misconduct. No appeal reducing the award has been reported as of the time of publication.