By SAM BAILEY
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — With hands medically restrained to a Wichita hospital bed, a 47-year-old woman was recovering from a traumatic brain injury when a man came into her room and sexually assaulted her, a new lawsuit contends.
Her case is the third civil lawsuit filed against Ascension Via Christi St. Francis hospital after alleged sexual attacks on patients by Miguel Rodela on June 15. On June 21, Rodela was charged with rape and two counts of attempted rape in Sedgwick County District Court, according to a news release by Hutton & Hutton Law Firm, the legal counsel for all three women’s cases. They are identified in court documents by their initials.
“Rodela admitted post-Miranda to law enforcement that he touched all three patients, P.S.P., B.L.D., and T.R.W., to sexually gratify himself and fulfill his sexual fantasies,” read the latest civil lawsuit.
Michelle McCormick, executive director of Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, said one reason this specific case is so difficult is that the victims were especially vulnerable and the last thing people who are in a hospital want to consider is being taken advantage of in this way.
“Any facility or any organization that is serving vulnerable folks need to understand, at least in my experience, folks who cause harm, folks who abuse, folks who perpetrate, are always looking for vulnerabilities to exploit,” McCormick said.
Rodela entered the Wichita hospital around midnight, following an employee through a door, according to the lawsuits. After entering and assaulting multiple women, he entered the room of T.R.W. and was seen by a certified nursing assistant who asked if he was a family member.
When Rodela said he was, he helped the assistant reposition the patient’s body before he was left alone in the room. When the CNA left the room, they informed a nurse about the man and security was alerted.
The nurse and security officer had different accounts of what the man, later identified as Rodela, was doing when they entered the room. The nurse said Rodela was sitting at the end of the bed with his pants “partially down but did not see his genitalia exposed,” read the lawsuit. The officer recounted Rodela was on top of the patient and lifting her clothes.
The officer engaged Rodela until more security arrived to take him into custody.
Medical professionals of the hospital walked in on Rodela in the rooms of all three victims listed in the lawsuits and after a brief confirmation from Rodela that he was a family member or nurse, he was left alone with the victim.
“The hospital’s failures are different in each case but equally hard to believe,” said Hutton & Hutton attorney Blake Shuart in the news release. “In this case, we have a completely helpless patient whose arms were strapped to the bed and Ascension’s nursing assistant actually walking in on the offender and asking him for help with patient care.”
McCormick said in her experience, people who assault others are good at getting away with their crimes and Rodela may have purposefully chosen a time when the hospital was chaotic. She said while it may be easy to assume someone would have noticed he didn’t belong in the room, people like Rodela are often incredibly charismatic and sophisticated, and combined with the busy hospital, people can be easily fooled.
According to the lawsuit, the patient’s husband was not informed by any hospital staff of the event and only found out from the Wichita Police Department.
“It’s awful,” said Andrew Hutton, founding attorney at Hutton & Hutton Law Firm, in the release. “She was absolutely helpless, and Ascension failed to even inform her or her family what had happened.”
McCormick said her hope is that policies and protocols are in place in facilities like the hospital to handle situations of this kind and facilities should consult local victim advocacy programs. She also said sometimes society mistakenly thinks crimes like what happened in Wichita are a private matter or only a responsibility of the victims.
“If we kind of step back and broaden our understanding that in every domain in our life, we could be considering where will perpetrators take advantage of someone and what do we do to prevent that,” McCormick said, “then we’d really go a long way as understanding this as the public health issue that it really is, and not just an individual’s problem to solve.”