Father notified of son’s death four months after the fact

The system failed both Richard Cunninghams, the father and the son.

Otherwise, how else would the son be dead for four months before the father learned of it?

The younger man had a medical episode at home, called 911 and was rushed to the St. Rose Dominican Hospital San Martin Campus in Las Vegas, where he died of natural causes on Nov. 10, 2009, at 63. No family was located. He was cremated and stored in the Clark County crypt.

His 80-year-old father, who lives in Pahrump, didn't learn his son was dead until March 6, 2010, when an investigator from the public administrator's office called.

The dad was located only because the power had been turned off in his son's condo and foul smells started wafting through the complex. Police were called.

Police responded, along with an investigator from the public administrator's office. They entered the son's condo and discovered the smell was from a refrigerator with rotting food. Within minutes, the investigator found contact information for the senior Cunningham and immediately called.

The elderly man is still upset it took so long to hear his son died. "My phone is listed. Why nobody called me, I don't know," he said. "I'm very angry. It doesn't make sense to me I wasn't notified sooner."

Public Administrator John Cahill said the hospital should have referred the case to his office if they didn't locate a family member, but he said no referral was made. (The coroner's office doesn't respond to natural-cause deaths in hospitals.)

A spokeswoman for the San Martin campus declined to comment, citing federal privacy laws.

Before April 1, 2008, the father wouldn't have waited four months. Prior to that, the public administrator responded to calls from hospitals and hospices to secure the property of the dead. An inspector would take the personal property at the hospital, look in the wallet and secure the residence. An investigator would have found contact information and called the father.

Two years ago, Cahill changed the routine to reduce his workload. "We have limited resources and can't do business as it was done in 2007," Cahill said. "We had to get control of the workload and prioritize what comes first."

Cahill accepts responsibility for the delay in notifying Cunningham's father. "In a sense, he's a victim of my decision to eliminate nonmandated services." But he cites the hospital's failure to report they couldn't find a family member.

Cahill also blames the lack of communication between the two Cunninghams.

The father said he didn't worry about not hearing from his son because his job involved overseas travel. "I was not worried because he was away a great deal of the time," said the retired California Highway Patrol sergeant. Even after his son retired, he'd go months without hearing from him.

In Nevada, the county public administrator administers estates when there is no one else to do it -- no relatives, no one to take responsibility. Sometimes people are estranged from their families. Sometimes they have outlived most of their relatives.

Cahill made the policy change because the law doesn't mandate his office respond to hospitals and hospices. The law says "may" instead of "shall."

State law reads the public administrator "may secure property of deceased" if there are no relatives able to protect the property and if failure to do so could endanger the property.

The "shall" is reserved for the legal aspects of the public administrator's job, primarily the probate work.

Cahill, a Democrat, faces a Republican opponent in November, Jack Clark, a former police detective and a member of the Henderson City Council for 16 years.

Cahill's policy change has become a political issue.

Read about that in Monday's column.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275. She also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/morrison.