BOULDER, Colo.—The parents of a Japanese physics phenom who killed herself at an institution near the University of Colorado two years ago are suing the health center, saying it was not watching the physicist closely enough.
Celebrated physics postdoctoral student Michi Nakata hanged herself with a noose she made from her hospital gown in 2006 at the Mapleton Center Behavioral Health Unit. Her parents say she was supposed to be under constant observation as one of the facility’s highest-risk suicide patients.
Kiyoshi and Yasuko Nakata are suing Boulder Community Hospital, which runs Mapleton Center, for wrongful death. The lawsuit alleges that the 30-year-old student from the Tokyo Institute of Technology should not have been left alone.
While staying at the center, the physicist cut her wrists with her glasses, wrote a suicide note with her own blood and then hanged herself with a strip of her hospital gown from a vent in the wall.
Michi Nakata spent three days on life support and died on Sept. 30, 2006. It was the first and only suicide in the facility’s 22-year history, the Daily Camera newspaper reported.
A spokesman for Boulder Community Hospital says he can’t comment on the suit, which was filed last month. But spokesman Rich Sheehan said the physicist’s death has not been forgotten.
“It certainly was a tragic situation, and the people here were devastated by it,” Sheehan told the newspaper.
The Japanese couple allege in their suit that Mapleton Center violated its protocols, which state that high-risk suicidal patients should be kept “within staff observation at all times.”
Specifically, the suit claims no one at the Mapleton Center removed Nakata’s eyeglasses before placing her alone in a video-monitored “quiet room,” that no one noticed her cut herself with the broken lenses, and that no one saw her rip a piece of cloth off her hospital gown, fashion a noose and hang herself.
Nakata’s colleagues at the University of Colorado, where Nakata worked from 2003 to 2006, say the physicist showed great promise.
“She was a superstar—somebody that would come along once in a couple of generations,” said Noel Clark, a physics professor at CU who mentored Nakata. Clark now represents Nakata’s estate and is a plaintiff in the wrongful death suit, along with her parents.
Nakata contributed to papers on liquid crystals and condensed matter physics. Some of her work was published posthumously in the journal Science.
She was admitted to the Mapleton Center on Sept. 27, 2006, after Nakata told her psychotherapist she was feeling “highly suicidal.”
According to the lawsuit, the Colorado Department of Health and Human Services investigated Nakata’s suicide, and in February issued a conclusion that the allegation that Nakata had not been properly supervised and monitored was “substantiated.”
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
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Information from: Daily Camera,
