Image: Sgt. Carmelo Rodriguez, Courtesy CBS
This CBS News story is absolutely heartbreaking.
Sgt. Carmelo Rodriguez wanted to do an interview with CBS, so newsman Byron Pitts arrived at the family home. What he saw was shocking.
A once vibrant, muscular, life- loving Marine, father, son, part-time actor and artist, whittled down to 80 pounds.
Pitts saw 29-year-old Rodriguez gasp his last breath. Rodriguez died just before the interview.
In this CBS news story, (video available here) *(Warning- very graphic image), the family breaks out in grief all on camera. They tell Pitts they want him to stay. But the story goes beyond the obvious tragic loss of a good family man.
It turns out the military had diagnosed melanoma in 1997 but, according to Rodriguez's uncle they never told Rodriguez and never told him to "follow up" on it. Instead the military called it a “wart” and only when it developed into stage 4 melanoma was it accurately diagnosed, 18 months ago.
“Don’t let this be it. Fight!” Rodriguez told his family before he died. But the family cannot fight the brick wall of military immunity.
In 1950, the Supreme Court ruled the Feres Doctrine can bar military personnel from suing over medical malpractice. Military personnel and their families lose the rights that U.S. civilians have, even though they have been fighting for America in a foreign land.
In 1997, when Rodriguez enlisted, during an initial military checkup the doctor documented that he had melanoma. Rodriguez's uncle states that the doctor never told the Sgt. and never told Rodriguez to follow up on it. CBS looked at the military medical report where the doctor calls the skin “abnormal” and “melanoma on the right buttocks.” There is no recommendation for further treatment.
The “wart" continued to grow as Sgt. Rodriguez is in Iraq. A military doctor finally advises he have someone look at it when he returns to the states in five months.
"If a birthmark is about that big [she holds up two hands], and … it has a raise like that and is pussing, just let it go and say it's a wart?" his sister, Elizabeth, said to CBS. "Who does that; how does that happen? It's not right. It's not right."
Sgt Rodriguez said he didn’t want others to go through what he did, but military insiders tell CBS that they are not surprised because it happens in hundreds of cases across the country, says a veterans group.
25-year-old Air Force Staff Sgt. Dean Patrick Witt’s appendicitis was misdiagnosed. He ended up brain dead after emergency surgery and later died.
The Feres Doctrine recently prevented a Navy widow from suing the military.
But some exceptions have been noted recently. A three judge panel in Florida allowed a military lawsuit to proceed on behalf of three Army servicemen killed in a plane operated by a Blackwater subsidiary. Other exceptions to Feres have been pursued by a claim filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act.
CBS asked the military to find the doctor responsible for the Rodriguez case but the military would not make him available.
Military law expert Eugene Fidell, who is an attorney, says he gets calls regularly and tells people they can bring a lawsuit, but it is a waste of time, even though a military nurse calls the Rodriguez case “a major screw-up.”
"George Washington said that when a person puts on the uniform, he does not cede being a citizen," Eugene Fidell said.
Sgt. Rodriguez would still be alive today if he had been told he had melanoma in 1997, his family says. A military email reads: “He should have been immediately seen and the wart removed and we may not have gotten to where we are now.”
Since the Sgt. was forced into early retirement due to his illness and was no longer on active duty, the family had to pay for his military funeral.
His seven-year-old son, Carmelo Rodriguez IV, will receive 55 percent of his military benefits. #