Emergency room doctor takes stand
Alleged victim tested positive for benzodiazepines, witness testifies
The trial of Mark Rumboldt continued in St. John’s Thursday with more testimony from medical staff working in the emergency room of St. Clare’s hospital the night of Jan. 22, 2016, when he and his wife arrived in separate ambulances.
Rumboldt’s wife had called 911 for an ambulance less than two hours earlier, saying her husband had taken Ativan and alcohol. By the time paramedics arrived at the couple’s west-end home, both of them seemed heavily intoxicated, unable to walk unassisted. Rumboldt was able to talk, but was slurring his words; his wife, paramedics and police say, was almost catatonic.
Dr. Chrystal Horwood told the court Thursday that blood tests the couple had shortly after they arrived showed nothing of concern. Rumbolt had a moderately high blood alcohol level, she said, but it wasn’t dangerous. His wife’s blood showed a low level of alcohol.
It was the woman’s scores on the Glasgow Coma Scale – a test used to determine a person’s level of consciousness – that were more alarming, Horwood said. When she assessed the woman about an hour and a half after she arrived, she scored her at an eight on the scale, which is marked from three at the most severe to 15.
“I was worried to the point that we needed to keep her on monitor and assess her until her score improves somewhat,” Horwood said, explaining that a patient with a score that low may not be able to protect their own airways.
Horwood said she left the woman in the hands of nurses while she saw other patients, and at one point nurse Stacey Kean came to her with an issue.
Kean told the court on Wednesday she had gone to check on the woman at one point and Rumboldt – whose condition had improved to the point that he had been discharged about half an hour earlier – was sitting by the woman’s bedside, holding a facecloth to her mouth. Kean said as he moved the cloth, she noticed a white substance on the woman’s lips, and what appeared to be residue and pieces of medication in her mouth.
Horwood said she, Kean and two other nurses went back to the woman’s bedside, where Rumboldt was still sitting. He was concerned his wife wasn’t breathing, Horwood said, as he had been since he was discharged.
Horwood said one of the nurses had used a tongue depressor to scoop the woman’s mouth and put the residue in a specimen container, but there was still some powder and a partially dissolved pill in her mouth. On the bed was a bottle of Ativan, prescribed to Rumboldt. Horwood said the woman did not open her eyes, even when Horwood tried to illicit a pain response by rubbing her sternum with her knuckles, and appeared to still present around an eight on the consciousness scale.
“Myself and the nurses were asking where the pills came from,” Horwood told the court. “We couldn’t get a clear response (from Rumboldt). He basically didn’t answer the question, but was saying (to his wife), ‘Did you take my Ativan with you?’ He was not engaging directly with us.”
Rumboldt was asked to leave the room, and the doctor and nurses pulled back the woman’s sheet and found a bag of pill bottles with Rumboldt’s name on them.
Paramedics previously told the court they had located pill bottles in the couple’s home and divided them according to who owned them – one bottle for the woman and several for Rumbolt – putting them in bags and keeping them with the patients as they went to the hospital. Horwood said a patient arriving in an ambulance in an “altered conscious state” would not be given access to their own medication.
“From there, we had suspicions something wasn’t right,” the doctor testified. “We were not getting answers, she had a pill in her mouth and a bag of pills under the blanket, and she didn’t have them when she came in.”
Medical staff decided to call the police, Horwood said. She said she ordered a drug screen for the woman, which revealed the presence of benzodiazepines, like Ativan.
The woman improved over the next few hours, Horwood said, at first nodding her head in response to questions, then speaking. She was discharged by 7 a.m. and was alert at that time, telling staff she was waiting for a family member to pick her up.