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Saturday, July 09, 2022

July 9, 1993: Chaos and Death for Honduran Immigrant at Fake Clinic

A Desperate Young Mom

Guadalupe Negron
Guadalupe "Lupe" Negron, age 33, had come to the United States from Honduras with her husband in the late 1980s. They left their three young sons with Lupe's mother, planning to send for them as soon as they could earn enough money. Lupe and Herminio sold flowers and ice cream from a cart on a street corner.

The need to earn money became more urgent after Lupe's mother died. 

Lupe and Herminio continued to work hard. They welcomed the children's new little brother, Byron Callejas, into the world.

Time were tough for the divided little family that summer of 1993. On the 4th of July a passer-by had tossed a firecracker through a window into the family's apartment, starting a fire that destroyed everything they owned. Neighbors gave the family used clothing and furniture to help them set up a new home. They loved the big lady with the bigger smile who would sometimes give children treats for free.

Things seemed to be looking up when Lupe got the opportunity to work through Calvary Hospital as a home-care aide for a neighbor with cancer. There was only one problem: Lupe was five months pregnant. She feared that she would not be able to get certified as a caregiver if she was pregnant.

Metro Women's Center

The young mother must have felt terribly torn. "She didn't believe in abortion," her niece, Helena de Monzon said to Newsday. "She knew it was a sin, what she was doing. But she didn't want to lose a job. It was a necessity." 

Lupe didn't discuss the situation with Herminio because he knew she'd talk her out of aborting their baby, Helena said. Instead, she told Herminio that she was ill that day and would stay at home. Herminio took 4-year-old Byron with him to start another working day.

Hoping to help her aunt through this difficult situation, Helena drove her to Metro Women's Center at 102-21 Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York on July 9, 1993. 

Though Lupe no doubt had concerns about her spiritual well-being, she was confident about her physical well-being. "She wasn't in any fear because they told her there wasn't any risk," Helena said.

Lupe might have felt differently had she known about the 56-year-old doctor who was about to take her life into his hands. Metro Women's Center, in fact, would not even tell Lupe and Helena the doctor's name.

Elyas Bonrouhi aka David Benjamin

The Iranian-born Dr. Elyas Bonrouhi came to the United States in 1982. He failed his certification test three times before he was able to be certified as an obstetrician-gynecologist. In 1986, while practicing under his original name in update New York, his license had been revoked for 47 incidents of misconduct including performing surgeries and deliveries in his office rather than a hospital and for performing an unnecessary hysterectomy. 

Bonrouhi insisted to the board, "Every patient I deal with, I deal like she is my sister." 

If this was true, Bonrouhi was cruel to his family.

One woman describing her ordeal at his hands to the medical board said, "He started cutting me after that and he just kept cutting me and taking pieces out of me and showing them to me and everything. The numbness wore off and I was screaming. Then he got scared because there was so much blood coming out ... he called the nurse ... so she got tissues and stuff and he just stuffed me with cloth on the inside and packed it in there. Then he sewed it right in me." She ended up hospitalized and required eight surgeries to repair the damage.

His fellow physicians testified against him. Dr. Anthony Dardano, who had been overseeing Bonrouhi's work as a stipulation for him getting provisional privileges at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Utica, New York, testified, "It took me one weekend of watching his work to suspend him. .... I found him to be intellectually dishonest, poor in surgical technique, and poor in medical judgment." Dardano described having to step in to stop the hemorrhaging on a patient during a C-section Bonrouhi was performing.

In spite of the evidence against him, Bonrouhi challenged the revocation, getting it reduced to a three-month suspension, before changing his name to Dr. David Elyas Benjamin and relocating to Queens.  

Just two weeks before Lupe and her niece walked into Metro Women's Center, the medical board had revoked Benjamin's license for botching gynecological procedures. He was still practicing while appealing the case.

The First Signs of Trouble

Lupe paid $800 (c. $1,600 in 2020) for the abortion. Abortions at Lupe's stage of pregnancy were typically performed in a two-day procedure, in order to dilate the cervix sufficiently without tearing it. Benjamin decided to just perform the abortion as a one-day procedure. He also took no steps to address her high blood pressure.

A receptionist for the facility noted that after Dr. David Benjamin had performed Lupe 's abortion at 10AM, she was moved to the recovery room and left unattended and without monitoring equipment for over an hour. 

Meanwhile, Helena sat in the waiting room, hoping all was well with her aunt. Some time after noon, she saw Lupe -- pale, bleeding, spitting up blood, and clearly in pain -- wheeled out on a stretcher. Benjamin said there had been "complications" and wheeled the ailing woman into an exam room.

Shortly afterward, Benjamin's wife, Jackie, who acted as his assistant, came out of the exam room screaming "Oh my God! Oh my God!" and "Call the ambulance! Call the ambulance!" However, the ambulance was not summoned until 1:40 PM.

What the Medics Saw

When paramedics Freddie Noboa and Miguel Acvedo arrived, they were flabbergasted. Noboa described it as "filthy" and "disgusting" and not even looking like a doctor's office. 

He and his partner found Lupe naked and bloody, still in the stirrups and without even a sheet to cover her. A nurse was screaming and trying to revive her in a small, unventilated room. None of the normal equipment to address an emergency was there. "There was no blood pressure cuff, no EKG monitor. He had one tiny cylinder tank of oxygen about eight inches long. He said it had run out." The medics also noted that Benjamin had inserted a breathing tube into Lupe 's stomach instead of her trachea, causing stomach fluids to travel up the tube. The fluids flooded into the mask and flowed back into her mouth, and down into her lungs. Noboa said that even if Lupe hadn't bled to death, she could have drowned in her own fluids due to the botched tube placement.

The paramedics also indicated that they were hindered in their attempts to save Lupe 's life because Benjamin lied to them about the nature of her problem. The emergency call itself had only been for a patient experiencing difficulty breathing.

"We got there within five minutes, but she was already dead on the table," Noboa said. "Her pupils were fully dilated." 

Both Benjamin and his wife appeared to be panic-stricken. "I told the doctor, 'Get out of here. You're doing everything wrong. Get out of the way." Meanwhile, "I could hear someone screaming in the background, which was the nurse. At first I thought it was a family member because of the way she was jumping up and down and screaming. I said, 'Ma'am, you have to get out of here."

The disgusted paramedic said that no anesthesiologist was present. "She was just given Demerol and Valium. .... He wasn't monitoring her vital signs." He refused to give his name and told the medics that the patient was unconscious due to "too much anesthesia."

The paramedics removed the face mask and misplaced tube, properly intubated the patient, and transported her to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead an hour later.

What Happened Next

Dr. Benjamin told Lupe's distraught family that she had died from a heart attack. The autopsy report found otherwise.

In trying to extract a 20-week fetus without having first properly dilated the cervix, Benjamin had lacerated Lupe's cervix and ripped a three-inch hole in her uterus. She hemorrhaged and went into shock and cardiac arrest. Authorities determined that Benjamin had initiated the risky procedure without having first examined the patient.

Dr. David Benjamin
Benjamin was indicted for second degree (depraved indifference) murder, second degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and tampering with evidence. Contrary to news coverage at the time, Benjamin was not the first case in New York history of a doctor being charged with murder for performing a legal procedure; that was Jesse Ketchum for performing a fatal abortion on Margaret Louise Smith in 1971. Slashing up a woman's insides then letting her bleed out, even if done safely and legally, can still be frowned upon.

Benjamin sobbed and pleaded during a hearing for his $750,000 (c. $1.5 million in 2022) to be lowered, but the judge instead raised it to $1 million. His family members screamed "Oh my God" and raised such an outcry that they were led from the courtroom.

He was offered a chance to plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter, which would have resulted in a sentence of three to nine years. He chose instead to go to court. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 to life. His appeal was rejected on the grounds that being a doctor doesn't grant the right to treat patients with depraved indifference.

One of the paramedics told a reporter, "I wouldn't take my dog there (Benjamin's clinic)."

The Legal Status of Fake Clinics

After Lupe 's death, reporters from Newsday noted that the city of New York had all the regulations in place they needed to shut Metro Women's Center down. Shortly after abortion-on-demand had been legalized in New York in 1970, the city put regulations on the books to cover facilities that performed abortions, regardless of whether they were actually licensed clinics. Evidently officials did little in terms of enforcing the regulations. Not one abortion facility, as of 1993, had ever been closed by the city for substandard or dangerous conditions. Metro Women's Center, like the bulk of abortion facilities in New York City at the time, was not actually a licensed clinic and thus was not regulated by the state.

In the aftermath of Lupe 's death, instead of calling for the city to begin inspecting the facilities and closing down the dangerous ones, New York City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman instead demanded that the city's hospitals speed up the roughly three-week wait time for abortions on their premises.

Alexander Sanger, head of Planned Parenthood of New York, faulted the state not with failing to shut Benjamin and the fake clinic down but rather with failing to advertise that abortions were legal and the state would pay for them with taxpayer dollars.

Guadalupe's brother and youngest son
Lupe's husband, Herminio , lay abed in shock after being informed of his wife's death. Friends and family gathered to support the grieving widower. The neighbors who had contributed furniture and clothing to help Herminio rebuild his home were raising money so that he could send his wife's body back to Honduras for burial. 

"All I want is justice," he told Newsday. "And I need help to get my kids here [from Honduras]."

Three weeks later Herminio filed suit against the doctor and the clinic, as well as against the state for not having shut the clinic down after determining that his practice constituted a risk to the public. The appellate court ruled that the medical board had acted within the scope of their duties.

Watch "Death at a Fake Clinic" on YouTube.

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