Arlington Heights Family Awarded $3M In Wrongful-Death Suit

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL — The family of an Arlington Heights woman has been awarded $3 million by a Cook County judge after she died due to complications during surgery to remove a benign uterine growth, according to the Daily Herald. But the settlement agreement between the parties would give the family $1 million, according to defense attorney Brian T. Henry.

The mother and cousin of Mary Gerontakis, a 35-year-old Illinois Department of Transportation engineer, filed the wrongful death lawsuit against Dr. Michelle Luthringhausen and WomanCare in 2015, two years after her death.

According to the complaint, Luthringshausen "should have stopped the routine procedure to remove the growth, called a fibroid," when complications arose during the operation, the Daily Herald said. The suit claimed "the doctor failed to respond to significant changes in her patient's blood pressure and heart rate for nearly 30 minutes during the operation," and that Gerontakis died the next day after suffering oxygen deprivation and cardiac arrest, according to the Daily Herald.