On Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, Sam Terblanche, a junior at Columbia University, went to a soccer match at Yankee Stadium. On the subway ride there, he told friends he felt lousy. On Sunday, he went to the emergency room complaining of headache and chills. On Monday, sicker, he went again. On both visits, Sam was discharged with a reassuring prognosis: “Acute viral syndrome.”
Sam updated his parents by text as he was leaving the hospital on Monday night. “Just a bad virus, will have to advil, vomit, and hydrate it out,” he wrote.
“Ugh,” his father responded, “Good news re no major known problem (I guess).”
On Thursday, Sept. 21, Sam’s father, Villiers Terblanche, received a call from a Columbia dean. “When he said ‘I’ve got sad news,’ I knew something bad happened,” Terblanche recalled in a deposition. He had the call on speaker phone in the family’s living room. “It became really chaotic for a few minutes because Louise” — Sam’s mother — “was screaming with the most piercing primal scream I’ve heard in my life and Ben” — Sam’s younger brother — “lost it.”
Two years after Sam’s death, his father (who is known as “VT”), still can’t understand how his 20-year-old son could have sought help at the Mount Sinai Morningside emergency department twice in 24 hours then died alone in his dorm room two days later.
Terblanche met with the chief medical officer, Tracy Breen (who has since become the hospital’s president), two months after Sam died. He made a recording of the meeting and handed it over as part of pretrial discovery. In a well-lit room, seated at a conference table, Breen explained that after an internal review, Mount Sinai Morningside had concluded that it was “comfortable, satisfied, whatever totally non-helpful word we use” with its decision to discharge Sam from the E.R. It was a “gut punch,” Terblanche told me.
Breen conceded that Sam’s death was an emergency provider’s “worst nightmare” and would likely prompt staff to “wonder and feel, like ‘Did I get it wrong?’” At the same time, she informed Terblanche that the details of the review were off limits to him — “confidential and internal.”
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