Four years ago, inside the most prestigious hospital in Tennessee, nurse RaDonda Vaught withdrew a vial from an electronic medication cabinet, administered the drug to a patient, and somehow overlooked signs of a terrible and deadly mistake.
The patient was supposed to get Versed, a sedative intended to calm her before being scanned in a large, MRI-like machine. But Vaught accidentally grabbed vecuronium, a powerful paralyzer, which stopped the patient’s breathing and left her brain-dead before the error was discovered.
Vaught, 38, admitted her mistake at a Tennessee Board of Nursing hearing last year, saying she became “complacent” in her job and “distracted” by a trainee while operating the computerized medication cabinet. She did not shirk responsibility for the error, but she said the blame was not hers alone.
“I know the reason this patient is no longer here is because of me,” Vaught said, starting to cry. “There won’t ever be a day that goes by that I don’t think about what I did.”
If Vaught’s story followed the path of most medical errors, it would have been over hours later, when the Board of Nursing revoked her RN license and almost certainly ended her nursing career. But Vaught’s case is different: This week she goes on trial in Nashville on criminal charges of reckless homicide and felony abuse of an impaired adult for the killing of Charlene Murphey, a 75-year-old patient who died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center on Dec. 27, 2017.
Prosecutors do not allege in their court filings that Vaught intended to hurt Murphey or was impaired by any substance when she made the mistake, so her prosecution is a rare example of a health care worker facing years in prison for a medical error. Fatal errors are generally handled by licensing boards and civil courts. And experts say prosecutions like Vaught’s loom large for a profession terrified of the criminalization of such mistakes — especially because her case hinges on an automated system for dispensing drugs that many nurses use every day.
The Nashville district attorney’s office declined to discuss Vaught’s trial. Vaught’s lawyer, Peter Strianse, did not respond to requests for comment. Vanderbilt University Medical Center has repeatedly declined to comment on Vaught’s trial or its procedures.
Vaught’s trial will be followed by nurses nationwide, many of whom worry a conviction may set a precedent even as the coronavirus pandemic leaves countless nurses exhausted, demoralized, and likely more prone to error.
Janie Harvey Garner, a St. Louis registered nurse and founder of Show Me Your Stethoscope, a nursing group with more than 600,000 members on Facebook, said the group has closely watched Vaught’s case for years out of concern for her fate — and their own.
Garner said most nurses know all too well the pressures that contribute to such an error: long hours, crowded hospitals, imperfect protocols, and the inevitable creep of complacency in a job with daily life-or-death stakes.
Garner said she once switched powerful medications just as Vaught did and caught her mistake only in a last-minute triple-check.
“In response to a story like this one, there are two kinds of nurses,” Garner said. “You have the nurses who assume they would never make a mistake like that, and usually it’s because they don’t realize they could. And the second kind are the ones who know this could happen, any day, no matter how careful they are. This could be me. I could be RaDonda.”
As the trial begins, the Nashville DA’s prosecutors will argue that Vaught’s error was anything but a common mistake any nurse could make. Prosecutors will say she ignored a cascade of warnings that led to the deadly error.
The case hinges on the nurse’s use of an electronic medication cabinet, a computerized device that dispenses a range of drugs. According to documents filed in the case, Vaught initially tried to withdraw Versed from a cabinet by typing “VE” into its search function without realizing she should have been looking for its generic name, midazolam. When the cabinet did not produce Versed, Vaught triggered an “override” that unlocked a much larger swath of medications, then searched for “VE” again. This time, the cabinet offered vecuronium.
Vaught then overlooked or bypassed at least five warnings or pop-ups saying she was withdrawing a paralyzing medication, documents state. She also did not recognize that Versed is a liquid but vecuronium is a powder that must be mixed into liquid, documents state.
Finally, just before injecting the vecuronium, Vaught stuck a syringe into the vial, which would have required her to “look directly” at a bottle cap that read “Warning: Paralyzing Agent,” the DA’s documents state.
The DA’s office points to this override as central to Vaught’s reckless homicide charge. Vaught acknowledges she performed an override on the cabinet. But she and others say overrides are a normal operating procedure used daily at hospitals.
While testifying before the nursing board last year, foreshadowing her defense in the upcoming trial, Vaught said at the time of Murphey’s death that Vanderbilt was instructing nurses to use overrides to overcome cabinet delays and constant technical problems caused by an ongoing overhaul of the hospital’s electronic health records system.
Murphey’s care alone required at least 20 cabinet overrides in just three days, Vaught said.
“Overriding was something we did as part of our practice every day,” Vaught said. “You couldn’t get a bag of fluids for a patient without using an override function.”
Overrides are common outside of Vanderbilt too, according to experts following Vaught’s case.
Michael Cohen, president emeritus of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, and Lorie Brown, past president of the American Association of Nurse Attorneys, each said it is common for nurses to use an override to obtain medication in a hospital.
Cohen and Brown stressed that even with an override it should not have been so easy to access vecuronium.
“This is a medication that you should never, ever, be able to override to,” Brown said. “It’s probably the most dangerous medication out there.”
Cohen said that in response to Vaught’s case, manufacturers of medication cabinets modified the devices’ software to require up to five letters to be typed when searching for drugs during an override, but not all hospitals have implemented this safeguard. Two years after Vaught’s error, Cohen’s organization documented a “strikingly similar” incident in which another nurse swapped Versed with another drug, verapamil, while using an override and searching with just the first few letters. That incident did not result in a patient’s death or criminal prosecution, Cohen said.
Maureen Shawn Kennedy, the editor-in-chief emerita of the American Journal of Nursing, wrote in 2019 that Vaught’s case was “every nurse’s nightmare.”
In the pandemic, she said, this is truer than ever.
“We know that the more patients a nurse has, the more room there is for errors,” Kennedy said. “We know that when nurses work longer shifts, there is more room for errors. So I think nurses get very concerned because they know this could be them.”
On Wednesday, the American Nurses Association (ANA) released a statement to express nurses’ concerns regarding the trial of former Nashville nurse RaDonda Vaught. Former Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse RaDonda Vaught is being charged with reckless homicide and abuse of an impaired adult after mistakenly administering the wrong medication that killed an elderly patient in 2017.
ANA believes that the criminalization of medical errors could have a chilling effect on reporting and process improvement. The Code of Ethics for Nurses states that while ensuring that nurses are held accountable for individual practice, errors should be corrected or remediated, and disciplinary action taken only if warranted.
COVID-19 has already exhausted and overwhelmed the nursing workforce to a breaking point. Nurses are watching this case and are rightfully concerned that it will set a dangerous precedent. ANA cautions against accidental medical errors being tried in a court of law.
Health care is highly complex and ever-changing, resulting in a high risk and error-prone system. Organizational processes and structures must support a “just culture”, which recognizes that health care professionals can make mistakes and systems may fail. All nurses and other health care professionals must be treated fairly when errors occur. ANA supports a full and confidential peer-review process in which errors can be examined and system improvements and corrective action plans can be established. Swift and appropriate action should and must always be taken as the situation warrants.
Transparent, just, and timely reporting mechanisms of medical errors without the fear of criminalization preserve safe patient care environments. ANA maintains that this tragic incident must serve as reminder that vigilance and open collaboration among regulators, administrators, and health care teams is critical at the patient and system level to continue to provide high-quality care.
As a photojournalist for more than 20 years, Alan Hawes saw life up close. NFL playoff games from the sidelines. Bruce Springsteen from the front row. Standing on the deck of a barge as the Civil War submarine the H.L. Hunley was lifted from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
But through all these exhilarating experiences, what stuck with him the most – what left a tack-sharp image in his mind, long after the photo was snapped and published – were the smaller, more intimate moments.
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“One of my life goals was to make an impact on the world through my career. And for a long time, I felt like I was doing that with photojournalism,” Hawes says. But one day, after a particularly emotional assignment at a hospital, he began to doubt his convictions.
“I saw these life-changing things happening in front of me,” the Chicago native explains, before briefly pausing to take a small step back in thought. “As a photographer, you’re an observer – and it’s an important job, being that messenger – but seeing those people work, the way they cared for the patients, the difference they could make, I felt like it was time to be a participant.”
And just like that, Hawes enrolled in a human physiology night course. It was really hard – and humbling for a father of two who was experiencing a bit of professional uncertainty – but he managed to get an A.
“I know this sounds weird, but I felt like I had a gift for understanding how the human body works,” he says. That led to another class. And another. “Then I was in it,” he says, with a wry smile. For almost two years, he continued to work as a newspaper photographer during the day and take nursing classes at night.
Eventually, his side passion became his central one.
Developing a talent
When Hawes was 12 years old, his father gave him a camera – a real one, one of those really nice SLRs with a big fancy lens – as a middle school graduation present. It wasn’t completely out of the blue. This was the same kid who used to always save up his money to buy film for the family’s Polaroid.
“One of my life goals was to make an impact on the world through my career.”
Once he had his hands on a legitimate camera, he was in business. And so he began to learn all the little nuances of exposure, shutter speed, aperture. That curiosity led him to serve as a photographer for his high school yearbook. Over the next several years, he developed a deep passion for the craft. During one assignment, he met a firefighter who introduced him to the art of listening to a police scanner. It was the window into the community, he told Hawes. That’s where the good stuff was, he said.
“I immediately bought one of my own, thinking if I had a scanner and a camera, I could take pictures of what was going on and then sell them to the local paper,” Hawes says. And, as simple as that, it worked.
After a while, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Associated Press would buy just about anything he shot. His reputation landed him a full-time job with a newspaper in Greenville and ultimately with the Post and Courier in Charleston.
His camera became a part of him – like an appendage.
Over the next two decades, Hawes would carry that appendage with him to document emotionally charged and poignant moments. The confederate flag coming down from the S.C. Statehouse. A man whose motorcycle careened over the side of the James Island connector left covered in so much plough mud, you could only see the whites of his eyes. Two Citadel football players sitting inside an ice freezer, the kind you see in front of gas stations, doing whatever it took to escape the blazing summer heat.
“I will always have that news bug in me. To experience up close what the rest of the world doesn’t normally get to.”
He snapped tens of thousands of images over the years; a surprisingly high number of them were so good that they won regional and national press awards, some gaining international accolades. Those images would appear in newspapers across the country and giant magazines like Sports Illustrated, and they would earn him the reputation as one of the best photographers in the business. But ultimately, all of that wasn’t enough for Hawes. And as difficult as it was to leave behind a career he loved, he was convinced his calling was elsewhere.
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Finding a higher resolution
In 2011, Hawes accepted his first job as a registered nurse at Summerville Medical Center. Two years later, he came to MUSC Health (Medical University of South Carolina) and has been here since. During his eight-plus years at the teaching hospital, he has worked in critical care, on the rapid response team (they are first on the scene in the hospital when there is concern for a deteriorating patient) and most recently, with some of the most serious COVID-positive patients in the hospital’s medical intensive care unit (MICU).
“Once I made it to the ICU, I knew I was in the right place,” he says. And when the world changed forever in March of 2020, not so surprisingly, Hawes was one of the first to jump into action in the COVID unit.
“I knew I was going into the belly of the beast in that unit, but that’s what I like to do,” he says. Just like all those years ago when he’d carefully keep an ear to the police scanner, looking for the action and then heading toward the trouble when most people would be headed in the opposite direction, he leaned into the heat and didn’t back off.
“It was super exciting but terrifying. But that was where the news was. I will always have that news bug in me. To experience up close what the rest of the world doesn’t normally get to. I had a front-row seat.”
Only this time, it was with a terrifying and largely unknown virus, not Tom Petty or the Green Bay Packers.
Depth of field
Somewhere along the line, Hawes had the idea to marry his two passions. After talking with hospital leadership, he got the green light to bring his camera into the units, something that is particularly tricky in the new world of patient privacy laws. But with the right permissions and everybody on board, it was something that could be carefully navigated.
“This virus robs us of so many things. It’s heartbreaking. Hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my career. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”
Hawes wanted people to see what he and his colleagues saw on a daily basis. He wanted them to see the compassion. The struggle. The reality.
“Honestly, as I was walking toward the building on the first day in the COVID unit, I knew how good a story this would be to cover as a photographer,” he says. Pride in his team coupled with frustration surrounding all the vaccine-related misinformation were the main reasons he wanted to do it. What “it” was, he wasn’t sure at the time, but he knew that through photographs – something not even the best writers can compete with when the pictures are really good – there was an opportunity to tell a powerful visual story. One that lets the general public peek inside a place that rarely pulls back the sliding blue drapes – and for good reason. After all, there is no more private, intimate or vulnerable environment than inside a hospital.
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For the next several weeks, whether he was on the schedule or not, Hawes would grab his camera and head into the hospital. At first, he explains, his colleagues were a bit leery of him. But he wasn’t just a guy with a camera. He was one of them. Slowly, they began to let down their guards, and eventually, they forgot he was even there.
What he witnessed was humanity at its absolute best … and worst.
A man dying slowly from COVID. Another with seemingly the same fate who miraculously made a turn for the better. A woman with the illness giving a pep talk to three other COVID-positive patients, passionately declaring how they were going to beat this. And along the way, there were a few smiles. And a lot of tears.
“I am really proud of my team, and I wanted people to see how hard they work, how much they care,” Hawes says. “But truly, I just wanted people to know that the people in here, these ones that are really sick, a lot of them are just regular people who weren’t vaccinated. And they’re dying because of it.”
During his time on the COVID unit, Hawes has seen miracles, families estranged over vaccine disagreements, laughter, tears. But the hardest thing he and his colleagues have had to do is facilitate a goodbye with no loved ones in the room – something no one should ever have to experience.
“You’re standing there, holding an iPad so a dying patient’s family can say goodbye. And the patient isn’t even conscious,” he says. “As a nurse, it’s such a helpless feeling. You need to be there, but on some level, you feel like you shouldn’t – their family should be the ones there. But this virus robs us of so many things. It’s heartbreaking. Hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my career. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”
Which is why he wanted to show the world his photos. Because it matters. What will become of them – an installation in a local art gallery possibly – he’s not sure. But what he does know is that this was an opportunity to use all the skills available to him.
“I will never stop seeing the world as a photographer,” Hawes says. “That guy is still in there, but these days, my heart is on the other side of the camera.”
And though he might not admit it, it proves that through both of his careers, he is able to impact the world.
She lost two relatives of her own to the pandemic and worked on the frontlines when Covid cut short the lives of so many New Yorkers that hospitals needed morgue trucks to house the dead. So, Sandra Lindsay, DHSc, MS, MBA, RN, CCRN-K, NE-BC, the director of patient care services in critical care at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, knew what was at stake when she was asked to bare her arm for the first official Covid jab in the US on December 14, 2020.
This Nurse of Many Weeks has played her role as nursing icon with a very un-celebrity-like grace and lack of pretension. On top of her usual job duties, she has spent most of the year urging people to trust the evidence that the Covid vaccines work, appearing at Zoom town halls and other events in a tireless campaign to combat junk science and medical mistrust.
“It’s the everyday, ordinary people seeing me on the street or in different locations and recognizing me, even with my mask on … and coming up to me and saying, ‘Thank you….'”
—Sandra Lindsay, DHSc, MS, MBA, RN, CCRN-K, NE-BC
Just last month, nurse Lindsay readily agreed to the request of 9-year-old Desiree Mohammadi, daughter of a Queens pediatrician, and held her small hand as a pediatric nurse administered a Covid jab. Afterward, Desiree sent her idol a grateful thank-you letter. The photos and video of the nurse who was the first person in the US to be vaccinated for Covid-19 will be in textbooks soon, but she is already inspiring children to seek a better understanding of both science and nursing.
“I encourage people to speak to experts who can answer their questions, to access trusted science. I let them know that it’s OK to ask questions.”
The nursing profession may be too diverse for any one nurse to be seen as its “face,” but Dr. Sandra Lindsay is nonetheless a superb representative. The 53-year-old critical care nurse displays the qualities that inspire our trust in nurses. She communicates clearly and honestly, in a no-nonsense manner; her practice follows science and evidence, not opinions. With those who prefer to heed opinions, her approach is nonjudgemental*, and seeks to persuade without condescension.
“It’s the only job I know of where they pay you to learn.”
—Joan Blondell, as “Maloney” in Night Nurse (1932)
As for the “nursing public,” any nurse can take pride in Lindsay’s ongoing pursuit of education. If you’re a nurse, your last name doesn’t have to be followed by an ever-expanding alphabet of degrees and credentials, but those proliferating letters do speak to the long-overdue increase in respect for nurses. (Of course, if the general public was aware of the mathematical calculations an RN performs every day or knew how quickly the “average” nurse masters complex new procedures, technology, and treatments, they might be intimidated). Lindsay is also a fine example of nurse leadership. She cites evidence as the basis for her words and actions and bears her responsibilities with a quiet, natural authority.
And for aspiring nurses, whether immigrant or native-born, Lindsay is an exemplar of the classic American dream: if you are smart, determined, self-disciplined, and willing to work very hard, you don’t need wealth or family clout to make a difference in the world.
But perhaps the most significant reason that Dr. Lindsay is our Nurse of the Year is this: as Elvis did with the polio vaccine, she set an example that is saving lives. When NPR spoke with her last week, she shared the following anecdote:
Lindsay was at the Jamaican Embassy one day (she was born there and immigrated to the US when she was 18) when a woman came over and began to thank her profusely. She told Lindsay that she and her family had not intended to be vaccinated—until she saw Lindsay getting that first jab on TV. After seeing the nurse’s confident mien, she said, “We all went and made an appointment. So I want to thank you so much for inspiring us.”
For that alone, may Dr. Lindsay have the best possible 2022, and many more great years after that.
RN Tammy Brown – our Nurse of the Week – is a good person to have around on an accident scene. Being “good in a crisis” is an essential component of the nursing skill set, but the stress and stakes are a little more challenging when the accident victim is your spouse, the accident is horrific and painful, and you have to prevent his/her death from shock and blood loss until the emergency team arrives. When that happens, your spouse can justifiably refer to you as “the ultimate hero.”
In this case, Tammy’s nursing expertise and preternatural cool saved her husband’s life on October 16. On that afternoon the Browns’ idyllic boating trip to Sand Island near Pensacola, Florida came to a premature and gruesome end when Tammy’s husband Rob (a clinical pharmacist) got his leg caught in the boat’s propeller. The beauty of the island and water often attracts local boaters, but the water was nearly deserted that afternoon when the Browns set out. When the boat kept getting stuck in some sand not far from the shore, Rob got into the water and went behind the boat to push it, while Tammy manned the steering wheel and worked the throttle to reverse. Then, she heard her husband’s agonized scream over the noise of the motor, “You got me! You got me!” – and their pleasure cruise metamorphosed into a scene from a Grand Guignol horror movie – complete with a bona fide jump scare.
While Tammy was trying to maneuver them free of the sand, a wave had hit the boat, which then bumped into Rob, causing him to slip and fall. His leg met the propeller, and as the motor ran, the blades chopped into his limb with the mindless and relentless brutality of the shark in Jaws. As Tammy later explained, “The boat came back with the waves and the current, and it [the propeller] grabbed him. It grabbed his foot. Then it took his whole leg, broke his femur and took all of his calf off.”
Tammy immediately pivoted to Trauma Nurse mode – with a dash of the adrenaline-fueled super-powers that often come when a loved one’s life is at stake. She jumped into the water, and tried to calm her spouse-turned-patient as she dragged him back to shore, reassuring him, “Baby we got this, we got this, calm down, we got this.” As she noted the severed lower part of Rob’s leg floating on the water, her husband gasped, “tourniquet.” Seeking the nearest rope, she headed for the anchor, “Everything was up. I had to jump on that boat.” She added, wonderingly, “I don’t know how I got on that boat. I’m short. Normally, I can’t climb on a jet ski without help.” In those moments, he [Rob] knew he was very close to dying,” Tammy told a local reporter after the incident.
Back on solid ground, she focused on curbing the blood loss from her husband’s mangled limb. Grabbing the rope, she got to work. “I had the leg, just trying to hold the leg together and hold the tourniquet,” she recalled, but an injury this severe allowed no time for tarrying. Once her makeshift tourniquet was in place, she hunted for her phone to call 911, and realized the phone was still on the boat. So, she coaxed Rob to hold onto the rope/tourniquet while she went back to the boat. After she retrieved the phone and returned to her husband’s side, Tammy faced a new challenge: making a call with gore-soaked hands. “My phone wouldn’t open.” Then, “I couldn’t get it to swipe because I have blood, tissue, and water on my hand… I was rubbing [the phone] in my hair trying to dry it. I started praying to God to please open my phone.”
Tammy somehow managed to call emergency services, then continued praying for divine support. The wait must have seemed endless. “Tammy sat on her husband’s leg, held his tourniquet, repeatedly called 911, and begged for help for 40 minutes until a U.S. Coast Guard speedboat located them on the beach,” according to the Pensacola News Journal. When the Coast Guard reached the pair, Tammy told them to take her husband to a hospital immediately, then to return and pick her up from the scene on Sand Island. As the Coast Guard ship carried Rob to Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, “I started walking the sand and praying to God to keep him … and as I was walking on the sand … all I could see was Rob’s bloodline.”
Once she reached Rob’s bedside, her optimism came flooding back. “[I said] ‘Praise the Lord! He’s alive. He is alive. It’s a miracle.’” In all likelihood, her quick actions and cool head saved Rob’s life. After five surgeries, he’s on his way out of the ICU and the hospital is fitting him for a prosthetic. “When you think all is lost, and you think there’s no hope, or this is it — hold on … hold on tight,” said Tammy.
The horrible freak accident has failed to sour the recent West Virginia expats on the joys of boating, though, and they have no intention of forsaking their trips to Sand Island. Rob started using a walker a week later, and they plan to resume their favorite Floridian activity after he fully recovers and can handle a prosthetic leg. Tammy sounds almost yearning as she describes the joys of their island trips: “We’d have the sand and all the beauty of the island in front of us. Then we go over to the Gulf-side and get in the waves. We’d have lunch in the boat… feed the birds. We go out on that boat, and we go to this island,” she declares. “We have our own spot, and we plan to do it again.”
The pandemic was in full swing as ICU nurse Ashlee Schwartz entered her tenth year as a nurse at Mercy Hospital in Fort Smith, Arkansas, but while critical care nurses may feel like they’re running on fumes these days, their profound sense of empathy and ability to care is still running at full steam. Like this Nurse of the Week, they continue to put the “C” in ICU as they go above and beyond to bring comfort to their charges.
When Schwartz – already a 2017 and 2018 Daisy Award winner – saw 23-year-old Eric Robison watching his 22-year-old wife Emily breathe with the aid of a ventilator, the sight went straight to the RN’s heart. Emily had recently given birth to a daughter, but the Covid-plagued young family was in no shape to celebrate. “The image will forever be inscribed in my head. He was just staring in a daze. It literally broke my heart to pieces,” Schwartz said. “Especially as an ICU nurse, the reality of life with this virus is any patient’s story could very well be our own story someday – and I just thought to myself, ‘What if this was me sitting in this chair staring into my husband’s room?'”
Due to Emily’s youth, her husband and clinicians had been hopeful even after she was placed on a ventilator, and Schwartz, a mother herself, stepped in for Emily as the unvaccinated new mom did battle with the relentless virus. Newborns require a LOT of equipment, so Schwartz started by announcing the birth of baby Carmen on Facebook and sent out a call for baby gear, as the beleaguered little family had not had the leisure to stock up on infant essentials. With a nurse’s thoroughness, she set up registries on Amazon, Go Fund Me, and other popular sites – and the response was astounding. The Go Fund Me raised $16,000, and over 200 people donated gifts.
“I remember all I could picture was if Emily was going to be able to overcome COVID, more than likely, Carmen would be home before Emily. Emily was going to be in the ICU for a handful of months and then go to intensive rehab and all I could picture after that was her coming home and walking into her house and having nothing for her new baby,” Schwartz said.
Tragically, Carmen’s 22-year-old mother succumbed to the virus even as caring strangers all over Arkansas and beyond donated gifts and cash for the baby girl.
“Never would I have imagined that gifts would start pouring in from all over Arkansas and the rest of the country,” Robison told CNN. “It’s bittersweet because I wish Emily was still alive to see it. But not having to worry about Carmen being taken care of is one less thing I have to worry about right now.”
“I called Eric and asked if he and Emily had a baby registry and he didn’t know what a registry was. He said all they had for Carmen were clothes. As Emily was fighting for her life, I just felt called and a sense of responsibility to make sure this baby had everything she needed,” Schwartz said.
“All I could picture was Emily coming home after being in the hospital for months and not having much of anything for Carmen and asking herself ‘Why did someone not help me?'”
After Emily’s death, Schwartz, with Eric’s blessing, made two pictures of the young mom’s handprints, so Carmen will “forever have a keepsake of her mama.” As she told Fox, “I love to see other people blessed, it makes my heart so happy, I’m so overwhelmed with happiness. If you can pay life forward to people it brings so much joy to your life, sometimes those acts of kindness, people will never forget.”
Robison now regards Schwartz as a family connection, and says, “Ashlee will be in Carmen’s life until she’s older and Ashlee’s sons and my daughter will probably be best friends.”
