A For-Profit Hospital Slashed Costs. Then a Patient Froze to Death on Its Roof. – Mother Jones

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Chelsea Adolphus had been bleeding for a week. She told Danny Gyal, her best friend, that it was like a period that wouldn’t end. It was getting worse, and she felt so weak she couldn’t stand.

Adolphus’ mother eventually convinced her to call 911, and early on the morning of January 22, 2025, an ambulance took her to the only emergency room in town: Vista Medical Center East. After so much blood loss, the 28-year-old was disoriented and anemic. Staff at the Waukegan, Illinois, hospital examined her and noted symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. They gave her Ativan and had her settle in for monitoring.

When Adolphus later called Gyal from the hospital, she was frustrated by all the waiting. As long as Gyal had known her, Adolphus was the one who brought the energy: playing music all day, doing everyone’s hair, refusing to sit long enough to watch a whole movie, and dancing—always dancing, especially to the hip-shaking rhythms of the punta from her native Belize. What was the point of lying here if the hospital wasn’t doing anything? Could Gyal come pick her up?

Gyal said Adolphus needed to stay and get treated. She promised to visit in the morning.

Information we obtained from court records and public record requests— including police reports and body camera footage—and interviews, describes what happened next. Over the next several hours, nurses noted that Adolphus still seemed disoriented and agitated. She was talking to herself and hallucinating, a known side effect of Ativan. Multiple times, Adolphus left her room, saying she wanted to go home.

When she left her room again in the middle of the night, nurses radioed for security. A guard coaxed Adolphus back to bed and told the nurses that she would need a sitter, which hospitals employ to stay with patients at high risk of wandering off or getting hurt. But no one was available: A week earlier, the company that owns Vista, American Healthcare Systems, had furloughed 78 employees, including many of the hospital’s sitters, to cut costs.

Around 2 a.m., Adolphus left her room again—this time running. She pushed through an emergency exit and flew down a stairwell. Two nurses followed, but not for long: They had other patients they couldn’t leave. So instead, they called security. Guards began walking the halls to look for her, but eventually were called away by an incident in the ER. When they reviewed the hospital’s security camera footage, they found no trace of her.

Staff knew there weren’t cameras in many parts of the building, and the ones that were there often didn’t work. Still, at 4:30a.m., they called off the search. They marked Adolphus as “discharged” without any evidence that she had left the hospital.

Later that morning, a nurse helping a patient about to give birth glanced out the window and spotted a woman lying on the second-floor rooftop, right outside. She was face down in a thin gown and socks. Staff rushed to the scene and found patches of bloody snow around a body. It was Adolphus.

Her wandering had led her through a boiler room door—propped open to keep the hallway warm—and then through another leading to the roof. Police reports and court records show that when Adolphus walked out onto the roof, no alarm sounded, and the door locked behind her. By the time staff decided to stop looking, Adolphus was stuck outside in temperatures that plunged to the low 20s.

When she was found nearly seven hours after she went missing, Adolphus had no pulse and her internal body temperature was 50 degrees. For 14 hours, emergency room staff tried to resuscitate her, her mom by her side, praying through tears. Adolphus’ mom had called Gyal, and she was there watching as staff used paddles to shock Adolphus’ heart, in what felt to her like a gruesome performance to give false hope. “You guys are sitting there lying to us that there’s a chance of her living,” Gyal recalls thinking to herself. “There was never a chance.”

Body camera footage shows that the next day, when police came to investigate, they waited for hospital leadership downstairs. They leaned on a ledge in the security office while the hospital’s guards talked through the shock of Adolphus’ death. One guard shook his head, emphatic: Why was there no sitter?

“It’s embarrassing—a total embarrassment,” he said.

“They could have sent one of us,” another guard said. “It’s crazy.”

According to court filings, the hospital first told her family that Adolphus had been found in the parking lot of a Dollar General down the road. Then, her brother was told she had been found in the facility’s backyard. Only after Adolphus’ family requested her medical records did the hospital admit the...