A jury awarded $48 million to the family of an 8-year-old girl who was tortured and killed in 2013 in a negligence lawsuit filed against the doctor who treated her, The Chicago Tribune reported.
Jurors deliberated for two hours Wednesday before finding that child-abuse pediatrician Norell Rosado was medically negligent in his treatment of Gizzell Ford, the Tribune reported.
Rosado treated the child for several weeks before she was found strangled, starved and beaten inside her grandmother’s Chicago apartment.
Helen Ford, the girl's paternal grandmother, is serving a life sentence for the slaying, the Tribune reported. The girl's father also was charged, but died in jail in August 2014 while awaiting trial, WLS reported.
Rosado denied the allegations in the lawsuit, testifying at trial that he only found "nonspecific" and "non-suspicious" abrasions on the child.
“We just wanted justice for Gizzell, and in our eyes we got it,” said the child’s mother, Sandra Mercado. “I just hope this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
The lawsuit filed by the girl’s family accused Rosado of failing to immediately alert authorities to possible signs of abuse, failing to ask basic questions about the injuries he uncovered in an exam and failing to properly document his findings, the Tribune reported. He examined Gizzell as part of a molestation investigation initiated by the Fords against her mother’s boyfriend.
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