AURORA, Colo. — Despite a teen disclosing a horrific pattern of physical and sexual abuse by her half-brother, a lawsuit says Children's Hospital Colorado failed to report the abuse to outside agencies for two years.
The parents of a girl under 18, identified as O.C. in the lawsuit, told providers about the abuse during psychiatric hospitalizations starting in late 2020, the lawsuit says. The lawsuit says O.C. repeatedly disclosed the abuse to providers at visits through May 2021, but according to the complaint, providers at the hospital only made internal reports and didn't report the abuse to outside legal agencies until December 2022.
"For over six months, I told all my doctors and providers that I had been physically and sexually assaulted for over five years by a family member," O.C. said in a statement to 9NEWS. "When nobody cared enough to call the police to arrest my abuser, I felt I wasn’t worth protecting and became terrified that he would retaliate by killing me or my family as he had always threatened. Everyone failed to protect me, but now I want to speak out loud enough, so this doesn’t happen to another child.”
The complaint says Children's Hospital Colorado implemented its own policies on how staff are required to report concerns of child abuse to outside legal authorities.
When 9NEWS asked Children's Hospital Colorado for a comment on the lawsuit, a spokesperson said, "While we cannot comment on pending litigation, we take our reporting obligations very seriously and make every effort to ensure abuse is timely reported."
The lawsuit alleges the case involving O.C. shows a systemic pattern of Children's Hospital Colorado failing to timely and properly report child abuse. The complaint mentions the case of Olivia Gant, who died at age 7 in 2017 after her mother Kelly Turner claimed she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. In 2022, Turner was sentenced to more than a decade in prison.
"Despite several internal reports of medical child abuse, CHCO Social Worker and Child Protection Teams failed to report the pattern of medical child abuse of Olivia Gant to outside agencies as required by Colorado law," the lawsuit filed on behalf of O.C. says. "Instead – in August of 2017 - CHCO granted the mother’s request to order the withdrawal of all care and food and transfer Olivia to hospice to starve to death."
Hollynd Hoskins, the attorney representing O.C., said this internal child abuse reporting system failed to prevent Gant's tragic death.
"This dangerous hospital practice has resulted in yet another systemic failure to report and arrest a child predator. How many more failures to report child abusers will it take for this hospital to finally change its policies to protect its child patients?" Hoskins said in a statement to 9NEWS.
In O.C.'s case, the lawsuit says, Children's Hospital Colorado and its providers determined nobody reported the child abuse from December 2020 through December 2022 to an outside agency as required by law.
A few months prior, in September 2022, the lawsuit says, O.C.'s half-brother confessed to child abuse and was arrested and charged with two counts of pattern of sexual abuse and cruelty to animals. In 2023, the half-brother was sentenced to the Department of Corrections.
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