Doctor sued in unrelated patient death

The same doctor who evaluated Chadwick Aaron Woodson is embroiled in a 10-year-old legal controversy over a teenager’s death at Western State Hospital.

In late 1994, Dr. Timothy Kane, now a private practitioner in Fishersville and the only contract psychiatrist at AMC’s Crossroads, had just graduated medical school and was a resident at the University of Virginia Medical Center. He also worked at Western State in Staunton and was on call there on Dec. 18, 2004.

Kane got a call about an 18-year-old patient named John McCloskey, who had arrived at Western State three days earlier and then was sodomized until his bowels ruptured.

McCloskey never recovered from the assault and died 14 months later.

“It was the worst case of malpractice I’ve ever seen,” says Roanoke lawyer Jonathan Rogers.

He sued Kane and the hospital on behalf of McCloskey’s parents in a $10 million federal lawsuit. Kane eventually was dismissed from the suit, while Western State paid the family $50,000 to settle the case in 2003.

A 2001 civil suit filed in Augusta County Circuit Court against Kane is still open but is not expected to go to trial until next year.

Circuit Court Judge Thomas Wood ruled in 2003 that Kane was a Western State employee and entitled to sovereign immunity - which protects state employees from lawsuits.

But the Virginia Supreme Court unanimously overruled Wood 16 months ago and sent the case back to Augusta County.

Kane is the only defendant. He has not returned several phone calls to The News Virginian over the past year.

Rogers, one of the McCloskey family’s attorneys, says Kane worked weekends at Western State and relied on a nurse’s diagnosis that McCloskey was constipated. He recommended suppositories, “which is the worst thing you can do,” the lawyer says.

“Then he sees him and does a very bad internal examination,” the lawyer says. “He doesn’t determine anything is wrong with him. He has a ruptured colon.”

After Kane ordered a soapy-suds enema, McCloskey’s colon “blows apart,” Rogers says, and he begins to vomit his own feces. But instead of transporting him to AMC, Kane orders McCloskey sent to U.Va. in shackles, the lawyer claims.

He died 14 months later without a digestive system and after fecal matter invaded his open abdominal cavity.

His assailant was never caught, although Western State’s administrator, Lynwood Harding, argued in court with no evidence that McCloskey was injured three days earlier by lawmen who transported him to the Staunton hospital from his hometown of Natural Bridge.

Court records later showed that Harding was himself under treatment for a mental illness at the time of McCloskey’s death. The Western State chief later drowned in his hot tub.

“This is one of the saddest cases I’ve ever seen,” Rogers says. “Dr. Kane didn’t cause the injuries, but he just didn’t respond as any appropriate person would have.”