A Desperate Young Mom
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Guadalupe Negron |
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.
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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 had come to the United States in 1982. He had 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 In 1986, while practicing under his original name in update New York, his license had been revoked for 47 incidents of misconduct including performing surgeries and deliveries in his office rather than a hospital and for performing an unnecessary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. While she waited, she tried to help another patient, a Mexican woman who had a 6-month old baby in a stroller and was waiting for aftercare. She'd suffered a massive infection from an abortion Benjamin had performed. She screamed in pain and begged for somebody to call her family.
Some time after noon, still trying to comfort the Mexican woman, Helena 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 said, "I saw the sign 'abortion clinic.' I was shocked. It was the back from of an office all the way in the back of the building, hot as hell and filthy."
He and his partner found Lupe naked and bloody, still in the stirrups and without even a sheet to cover her. A woman dressed like a nurse was screaming, "Do something! Do something!""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 or an incident report to take to the hospital and told the medics that the patient was unconscious due to "too much anesthesia."
Noboa was also disgusted with the doctor's demeanor. "He was nervous for himself. He kept saying, 'Make sure you tell them I gave her the oxygen.'"
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.
Meanwhile, Back at the Not-a-Clinic
Once Lupe had been loaded into the ambulance and Helena had left for the hospital, Benjamin's receptionist, identified only as Maria, decided she'd had enough. Her boss called for his next patient -- the Mexican woman who was screaming in agony. Instead Maria hustled the woman and her baby out of the facility. Police eventually tracked her down to testify against the doctor. Fortunately for her, she had gotten her aftercare elsewhere.
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.
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Dr. David Benjamin |
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.
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Guadalupe's brother and youngest son |
"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.
- Dept. of Health and Human Services Departmental Appeals Board Docket No. C-98-353 Decision No. CF681
- Medical Board Order No. BPMC-93-79
- "Botched abortion killed woman," New York Daily News, July 11, 1993
- "Secret Abortion Kills Mother of Four," New York Newsday, July 12, 1993
- "Officials Investigate Fatal Abortion," New York Newsday, July 13, 1993
- "Abortion docs who bilk poor," New York Daily News, July 13, 1993
- "Abort doctor probed," New York Daily News, July 14, 1993
- "'Already Dead'," New York Newsday, July 15, 1993
- "A witness to butchery," New York Daily News, July 15, 1993
- "Dumped By Profession," New York Newsday, July 16, 1993
- "State had yanked abortion doc's license," New York Daily News, July 17, 1993
- "Cut Too Quick," New York Newsday, July 18, 1993
- "Abortion Regs Ignored," New York Newsday, July 19, 1993
- "Abortion doc sued," New York Daily News, July 30, 1993
- "Woman's Family Sues Alleged Abortion Doc," New York Newsday, July 30, 1993
- "Abortion Doc Loses License Permanently," New York Newsday, August 4, 1993
- "Heroes on quest: carve butcher doc," New York Daily News, August 4, 1993
- "N.Y. med board puts doctor in fatal abortion out of biz," New York Daily News, August 4, 1993
- "Doc indicted in abort-death," New York Daily News, August 12, 1993
- "Murder rap for doc in abortion death," New York Daily News, August 13, 1993
- "Death Shattered Family," New York Newsday, August 13, 1993
- "Doc: 'Not Guilty' In Abortion Death," New York Newsday, August 13, 1993
- "Doc faces murder charge in abortion," The Daily Times, August 13, 1993
- "Abortion Doc Charged With Murder," Newsday Suffolk Edition, August 13, 1993
- "Abort doc weeps, but bail's raised," New York Daily News, August 27, 1993
- "Court: N.Y. not liable in murder," Democrat and Chronicle, March 8, 1996
- "Court Upholds Verdict In '95 Abortion Death," New York Newsday, March 24, 2000
- "N.Y.'s high court won't hear abortion murder case," The Post-Star, June 22, 2000
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