Hospital settled Armstrong’s death for $6 million
When Neil Armstrong died in a Cincinnati hospital two weeks after undergoing heart surgery in 2012, his family released a touching tribute addressing the astronaut’s millions of admirers around the globe.
But in private, the family’s reaction to his death at 82 was far stormier. His two sons contended that incompetent post-surgical treatment at Mercy Health — Fairfield Hospital had cost Armstrong his life, and even one expert retained by the hospital would find serious problems with his care.
The hospital defended its handling of the case but paid the family $6 million to settle the matter privately and avoid devastating publicity, documents show. The hospital insisted on keeping the complaints and the settlement secret.
Armstrong had undergone bypass surgery in early August 2012, and his wife told The Associated Press afterward that he was “amazingly resilient” and was walking in the corridor. But when a nurse removed the wires for a temporary pacemaker, he began to bleed into the membrane surrounding the heart, leading to a cascade of problems that resulted in his death on Aug. 25.
In a scorching July 2014 email to the hospital’s attorneys, Wendy R. Armstrong, a lawyer and the wife of Armstrong’s son Mark, noted that Mark and his brother, Rick, would soon be traveling to Florida to speak at a ceremony marking the 45th anniversary of the first moon landing.
“This event at Kennedy Space Center will receive national news coverage,” Wendy Armstrong wrote. “Rick and Mark have been solicited by several book writers and filmmakers for ‘information about Neil that no one already knows.’”
The lawyer suggested that unless the parties reached a quick settlement, the hospital would be publicly lambasted for giving lethally flawed care to one of America’s most famous and revered public figures.
News of the medical dispute and secret settlement, never before reported, comes to light days after the 50th anniversary of Armstrong’s moonwalk drew a flood of nostalgic coverage celebrating his feat. The New York Times received by mail from an unknown sender 93 pages of documents related to the astronaut’s treatment and the legal case, including dueling reports by medical experts for the two sides. Some of the documents, although marked “filed under seal,” are publicly available at the probate court’s website, confirming that the documents received by The Times are authentic. An unsigned note included in the envelope said the sender hoped the information would save other lives.
The legal settlement illustrates the controversial but common practice of confidential settlements in medical malpractice and other liability cases, which protect reputations but hinder public accountability. And it shows how the extraordinary renown of a figure like Armstrong can become a powerful hammer in negotiations.
Records from the Hamilton County probate court show that the bulk of the settlement, nearly $5.2 million, was split equally between Armstrong’s sons, Mark and Rick. The astronaut’s brother and sister, Dean A. Armstrong and June L. Hoffman, each received $250,000, and six grandchildren each got $24,000.
The astronaut’s widow, Carol, who was Neil Armstrong’s second wife, did not participate in the settlement and said in an interview: “I want that for the record.”
When a reporter noted that she had signed off on the settlement in her role as executor of the estate, she replied, “I had no choice — it was either that or lose my job as executor.” She told the reporter she was subject to a confidentiality agreement.
Mark and Rick Armstrong did not respond to requests for comment. Wendy Armstrong, who acted as the family’s lawyer in the settlement, likewise did not respond. Nancy A. Lawson, the attorney who represented the hospital group in negotiations, declined to discuss the case.
Three expert reviews of Neil Armstrong’s medical records — one prepared at the request of the Armstrong family and two for the hospital — provide an outline of what happened after he was admitted to Fairfield Hospital in the Cincinnati suburb of Fairfield with symptoms of heart disease.
After running tests, doctors at Fairfield decided to do bypass surgery immediately — timing that some experts would later question. As a standard part of the procedure, doctors implanted temporary wires to help pace his heartbeat as he recovered.
But when a nurse removed those wires, Armstrong began to bleed internally, and his blood pressure dropped. Doctors took him to the hospital’s catheterization lab, where an echocardiogram showed, in one expert’s words, “significant and rapid bleeding.”
There, doctors drained blood from his heart to prevent it from being pressed and hampered by the accumulated fluid.
Armstrong was then moved from the catheterization lab to an operating room. The records do not make clear what doctors may have done there, but he appears to have lingered for a week or longer before dying on Aug. 25.
The expert reviews focus on the hospital’s decision to take Armstrong to a catheterization lab rather than directly to an operating room when he began to experience complications.
“The decision to go to the cath lab was THE major error,” Dr. Joseph Bavaria, a vice-chair of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a review conducted at the request of the Armstrong family.
Dr. Richard Salzano, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Yale Medical Center who reviewed the case for the hospital, saw the decision to bring Armstrong to the catheterization lab as “defensible” but “certainly riskier than taking the patient to the OR.”
Salzano told hospital lawyers that after the bleeding began, Armstrong might have had a 50-50 chance of survival had surgeons reopened his chest in the catheterization lab, but that “the patient became unsalvageable on the way to the OR,” case records show.