Family files suit in death of prison physician

Says he contracted Legionnaires’ at work

About four years ago, Joseph Mollura decided he liked his part-time work as a physician at State Correctional Institution Pittsburgh so much that he left his private practice for a fulltime job as medical director at the state prison along the Ohio River in Pittsburgh.

Jumping from working with the general public to prisoners was not an issue for him, his son, Joseph G. Mollura said.

“People were people to him,” the son, a radiologist in upstate New York, said Tuesday. “If they were sick, he’d help them.”

But his family sees that decision differently now: The elder Dr. Mollura died on Aug. 8, 2016, after contracting Legionnaires’ disease.

A lawsuit the family filed May 4 in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court claims that Dr. Mollura contracted the deadly disease while working at SCI Pittsburgh. The suit is filed against the state Department of Corrections and Capital Technologies, a company the state hired to provide water treatment services at the prison.

The wrongful death lawsuit alleges that Dr. Mollura, 60, of McKeesport contracted the disease at least two months after the prison first detected high levels of Legionella bacteria in the water cooling tower on the building where he worked at the prison campus in the Marshall-Shadeland neighborhood.

Though the state knew as early as May 2016 that it had a problem with Legionella in the cooling tower, Dr. Mollura “knew nothing about that,” said his daughter, Lorraine DiNatale. “They should have notified the medical staff when they found it in May.”

Dr. Mollura was not a direct state employee. He worked for a contractor, Correct Care Solutions of Nashville, Tenn., that since 2014 has had a contract to run the prison’s infirmary.

Legionella, which infects people when it is drunk or breathed in with water, was found in the cooling tower and in the medical building and was in the prison’s water system, said the family’s attorney, Neil Rosen.

“And Dr. Mollura was a physician who regularly came into contact daily with water and other areas that could have been contaminated,” Mr. Rosen said. “The [water] system over there [at the prison] was a bad system that put people in jeopardy.”

The state DOC Tuesday declined to answer emailed questions about whether inmates or other employees were infected with Legionella. It did not answer questions about whether it had a Legionella treatment system, or added one after the detection of Legionella. In its emailed response, it outlined what DOC did in response to finding Legionella in the cooling tower and in the water system, including cleaning outlets and super-heating the water system.

The DOC also maintained that it could not comment about the lawsuit because it had not been served, though the county court’s online system indicates it was served May 17.

Emails and phone messages left with Capital Technologies president, Warren Yeckel, and vice president, Joel Yeckel, were not returned.

Dr. Mollura died while on a trip to Orlando, Fla., to attend his son, Steven’s, college graduation, after spending the previous three days in an Orlando hospital.

As hard as it was to lose their father, Ms. DiNatale said what troubled the family even more was to read three weeks after his death that the state was finally doing something about the Legionella issue — but never mentioned that their father had died from Legionnaires.’

In the eight-sentence

“... Dr. Mollura was a physician who regularly came into contact daily with water and other areas that could have been contaminated. The [water] system over there [at the prison] was a bad system that put people in jeopardy.” — Neil Rosen, Mollura family attorney

press release issued Sept. 1, the state said it had found “higher than acceptable levels of Legionella” in the cooling tower and medical building and it was providing bottled water to employees and prisoners.

“All of a sudden the state started bringing in bottled water?” Ms. DiNatale said of the Sept. 1 release. “It was too little too late.”

The same press release quoted state Corrections Secretary John Wetzel as saying that state officials took “this matter seriously and are being proactive,” even though the high levels of Legionella had been found four months earlier.

At the time, the state also was denying that any inmates or employees had contracted Legionnaires’ disease.

Last Tuesday would have been Dr. Mollura’s 61st birthday. The family did not have any event to commemorate the date.

But Ms. DiNatale has regular reminders of the impact he had on the world through a steady stream of former patients and family members who call or write to say he helped them or saved their lives.

“When he was alive, I was numb to it; I’d heard it so much,” she said. “Now that he’s gone, hearing those stories, it affects you so much. It’s just such a shame.”