A jury on Wednesday awarded nearly $2.5 million to a Georgia couple whose baby was decapitated during childbirth, after a video from the infant’s autopsy was posted on social media without their consent, according to a defense lawyer and court documents.
Jessica Ross had been in labor for several hours with her first child on July 10, 2023, when the baby became stuck behind her pelvic bone, according to court documents.
Ms. Ross and her partner, Treveon Isaiah Taylor Sr., accused their obstetrician in a separate lawsuit of applying excessive force to the baby’s neck, separating the head from the body.
The couple did not get to see their baby, whom they named Treveon Isaiah Taylor Jr., after he was delivered at Southern Regional Medical Center in Riverdale, Ga., about 13 miles south of downtown Atlanta.
Doctors and nurses did not tell them he had been decapitated, according to court documents.
After Ms. Ross was discharged from the hospital, the funeral home alerted her to the condition of her baby’s body, according to court documents. She hired Dr. Jackson Gates, a pathologist, to perform an autopsy.
Two days after he was hired, Dr. Gates posted a video to his Instagram account that “showed in graphic and grisly detail a postmortem examination” of their infant’s “decapitated, severed head,” lawyers for Ms. Ross and Mr. Taylor said in their complaint.
Dr. Gates deleted the video but then posted two more videos from the autopsy days later. All of the videos were posted without the consent or agreement of Ms. Ross and Mr. Taylor, according to the complaint.
Lawyers for Ms. Ross and Mr. Taylor did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Cory Lynch, a lawyer for the couple, told Fox 5 Atlanta that Dr. Gates’s actions were “baffling.”
“For him to post these images and videos without permission,” he said, was “insane to us.”
“And especially with the nature of the posts,” he added, “of the grisly details of the autopsy examination and also pictures of the child’s head. It was baffling that he would do something like that.”
Dr. Gates never responded to the lawsuit, which was filed in State Court in Fulton County, Ga., leading to the court to issue a “default posture,” according to Ira Livnat, Dr. Gates’s lawyer. That meant that the case was automatically resolved in favor of the plaintiffs.
“The plaintiffs got the absolute best case,” Mr. Livnat said, adding that he was hired after the default posture.
The case went to a jury to decide the damages.
Ms. Ross and Mr. Taylor asked for $3 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages, Mr. Livnat said. The jury decided on $2.2 million in compensatory damages and $250,000 in punitive damages, he said.
Mr. Livnat said that his client “deeply, deeply regrets any harm.”
In a post on Facebook that has since been deleted, Dr. Gates said that the outcome of the case was “a complete miscarriage of justice” and that he intended to file an appeal.
The lawsuit that Ms. Ross and Mr. Taylor filed against the obstetrician, Dr. Tracey St. Julian, as well as Southern Regional Medical Center and six unnamed nurses is still pending.
That suit accuses Dr. St. Julian of applying excessive force to the infant’s neck and head during an attempted vaginal delivery, and says that she failed to call for additional help or perform an emergency cesarean section in a timely manner.
A spokeswoman for the hospital has denied the allegations. A lawyer for Dr. St. Julian did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
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