Colorado black ICU nurse wins $20 million after being arrested for a 93-yo patient’s death. She takes the hospital to court: ‘racial discrimination’

A federal jury in Colorado has closed out a six-year legal fight between a former intensive care nurse and the hospital system that fired her, and the number attached to the verdict is hard to ignore, according to Atlanta Black Star. DonQuenick Joppy, who once worked in the ICU at The Medical Center of Aurora, spent years fighting allegations that followed a patient’s death, including manslaughter charges that were eventually dropped. That fight ended last month with a jury finding that the hospital had retaliated against her for complaining about racial discrimination.

Jurors awarded Joppy $20 million, split between $5 million in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitive damages, after finding that HCA-HealthOne, the parent company of the Aurora hospital, terminated her in retaliation for complaints she had made about discrimination on the job. U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney approved the verdict the following day, bringing the discrimination and retaliation claims to a verdict after years of litigation over Joppy’s firing.

The case started, according to Joppy’s lawsuit, with the kind of workplace friction that is hard to prove until it isn’t. She said she was hired into the TMAC ICU in 2017 and, despite a favorable 2018 performance review, was treated differently from her non-Black coworkers.

Then came an even bigger problem

Charge nurses reportedly yelled at her and criticized her in ways her colleagues did not experience, and one supervisor allegedly told her that since she was good at cleaning, she should “clean his house and clip his dog’s toe nails.” After a white patient’s family accused her of theft without any investigation, she says she was restricted to one section of the ICU and barred from the break room other staff used.

By March 2019, Joppy applied for a transfer out of the ICU, hoping, per her complaint, to get away from what she described as abusive treatment. The transfer interview was reportedly canceled the same day it was scheduled, after she learned she had been placed on a performance improvement plan, news she said came as a shock.

Allegations of unequal treatment toward Black patients and staff inside hospital walls have surfaced elsewhere too, including in a separate case involving a new mother who said hospital staff refused to hand over her baby hours after a C-section. The elderly patient’s death two months later changed the course of the dispute. She said in her lawsuit that a respiratory therapist directed her by phone to withdraw the man from his ventilator, and that she stayed with his family as he died, showing no signs of distress. 

The hospital disagreed, arguing she had acted outside her scope of practice and reported her to the state. Colorado’s Attorney General’s Office filed charges of manslaughter and negligent death of an at-risk person against her in November 2020, only to drop the case in September 2021 “in the interest of justice.”

HCA-HealthOne has said it plans to appeal, maintaining that Joppy “chose to turn off the ventilator on a living patient” and that her firing came “because of the actions she took, and those actions alone.” The jury’s verdict, however, found that the hospital had retaliated against Joppy for her complaints about racial discrimination. In her own statement, she said the win was the “final piece” needed after enduring “false accusations, racial discrimination, retaliation, and bullying.”

For now, Joppy told reporters she is focused on rebuilding a stable home with her teenage daughter, after years of housing instability that followed her firing from the hospital.