The family of a 5-year-old boy who died in a horrific fire inside a hyperbaric chamber in Michigan is suing the manufacturer and the medical facility where it happened for $100 million.
Thomas Cooper was being treated at The Oxford Center in Troy on January 31 when the chamber caught fire. Attorneys for his family say the tragedy was no accident but a disaster waiting to happen. According to CBS News, the lawsuit filed Monday claimed the fire “was a foreseeable, inevitable, and virtually certain result of Defendants’ callous indifference to human life.”
James Harrington, one of the attorneys representing the Coopers, described how quickly it unfolded. “There’s a time period that it takes to pressurize, and within a short period of time, he becomes engulfed in flames,” Harrington said.
Thomas’s parents had brought him to the center for treatment related to sleep apnea and ADHD. But according to the lawsuit, the hyperbaric chamber itself was dangerously flawed. Sechrist Industries, the company that manufactured the device, “manufactured, designed, tested, and placed into the stream of commerce its monochamber with full knowledge that it was, in essence, a coffin waiting to ignite,” the filing read.
The lawsuit argues Sechrist was well aware that “the introduction of a single spark, arc, or ignition source in its chamber – pressurized with pure oxygen – would create an inferno from which no patient could possibly escape alive.”
Harrington said the device had no built-in protections to save lives in the event of a fire. “There were so many failures,” he said.
“It was designed and manufactured without fire suppression systems, without a deluge system, without an automatic fire detection system, without an effective emergency extraction system, without any warnings whatsoever regarding fire and explosion hazards, without any warnings regarding prohibited items to be taken into the unit, without any warnings whatsoever of electrical hazards, without any warnings and lack of an emergency extraction system.”
The lawsuit also names The Oxford Center, its owner Tamela Peterson, and three employees as defendants. CBS News reported that all four have already been criminally charged in connection with the boy’s death.
“My fear is that there’s others operating out there in a similar way, endangering American families and Americans every single day,” Harrington said. “This is a very, very, very serious incident that was so preventable. And it’s my hope that through our collective work here with the family and our legal team we’re able to bring awareness on the use of these, inherent dangers that lie with the use of these hyperbaric chambers.”
The Cooper family’s lawsuit paints a grim picture of a treatment device marketed as safe but described in court documents as an oxygen-filled trap. The case is likely to intensify scrutiny of hyperbaric chambers across the country and whether enough safeguards are in place to protect patients.