By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
A jury has ordered Miami-Dade County to pay $10 million to a former deputy chief medical examiner who was demoted, harassed and wrongly fired in August 2021 after blowing the whistle about misconduct and illegality.
It is one of the largest awards against the county in recent memory involving an agency that was once among the nation’s most respected for providing professional death investigations. The award was divided – $2.77 million for illegal retaliation that violated Florida’s Whistleblower’s Act and $7.230 million for wrongful termination.
The trial, and the complaint that led to it, also has raised disturbing, yet unaddressed questions about how the ME’s office may have been used in an illegal scheme to harvest and sell human tissue and body parts.
The misconduct alleged by Dr. David F. Garavan during a four-day trial before Circuit Judge Barbara Areces that ended Friday wasn’t confined to the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office. The jury also was told about “systemic” failures at the county’s Human Resources Department (HR), County Attorney’s Office and the office of then-mayor, now Republican congressman, Carlos Gimenez.
What the jury was told happened at HR is illustrative. Garavan’s 47-page complaint says HR conducted a “biased and unprofessional…witch hunt” against him based on complaints of sexual harassment by an antagonistic female doctor at the medical examiner’s office that were later determined to be unfounded.
Further, then-HR Director Arleene Cuellar broke state law and county policy by publicly disclosing in a July 2019 investigative report that Garavan was the confidential whistleblower who months earlier had filed a complaint with the Miami-Dade’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) against another ME colleague for allegedly “running a private business out of the ME Office and engaging in other illegal/unethical activities.”
‘Inexcusable’
“It was simply inexcusable for Defendant’s HR Director, Arleen Cuellar, to include this highly confidential information in a report that she knew would become public record the moment it was issued,” the complaint says.
Today, Cuellar is senior advisor to the county’s Chief Administrative Officer, Carladenise Edwards.
Florida law makes it a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison to “willfully and knowingly” disclose a whistleblower’s identity without their consent. Cuellar, however, has not been charged with any crime.
Cuellar did not respond to a request for comment.
Dr. Mark Shuman, who Garavan accused of running his private business out of the ME’s office, denied it in an interview with Florida Bulldog on Tuesday.
“No, I wasn’t running a business out of the office. That was an allegation that was never substantiated,” said Shuman, who retired from the medical examiner’s office two years ago. Nevertheless, an investigation by the county’s inspector general’s office later determined that Shuman did earn substantial outside income while sometimes using county materials and supplies to his benefit.
Shuman labeled the jury’s verdict against the county “insane,” and called Garavan “a sociopathic manipulative asshole, basically, who was never qualified for the job that he got.”
HARSH CRITICISM OF EX-CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER LEW
Still, some of Garavan’s harshest criticism was directed at former Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Emma Lew, who the complaint says routinely failed to provide close oversight or enforce the agency’s policies and procedures. As a result, by early 2017, two years into her leadership, “an office culture developed where many of the professional employees and managers felt that they could violate the rules with impunity and answer to no one but themselves,” the complaint says.
“She took that office from like basically a three star Michelin restaurant, the gold standard for the entire world, to a poorly run McDonald’s,” said Garavan’s attorney, Fort Lauderdale’s Christopher Sharp.
Lew declined to comment directly through a spokesman, who referred a reporter to the assistant county attorney who tried the case, Leona McFarlane. McFarlane did not respond to Florida Bulldog’s request for comment.
Lew is best known locally for her notorious opinion in the 2012 death of Darren Rainey, a 50-year-old inmate at the Dade Correctional Institution. She declared that he suffered no burns after a guard locked him in a scalding-hot shower until he died and that his death was an accident. Hideous autopsy photos of Rainey still available on the Internet show much of the skin on his chest, back and legs was reddened, blackened and peeling. Rainey’s family settled their wrongful death lawsuit against the state for $4.5 million.
Lew was named chief by Mayor Gimenez after longtime Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Bruce Hyma died in April 2016. More than a year, in June 2017, she promoted Garavan over Shuman to take her old slot as deputy chief.
In July 2017, the complaint says, supervisor Garavan confronted Shuman about “a pattern of being absent from work (with pay) when he was scheduled on Mondays so that he could work private cases over the weekend in locations such as Las Vegas. Dr. Garavan also had to confront Shuman after Shuman refused to attend a crime scene when he was scheduled to work on a Saturday.
“When Plaintiff went to discuss Shuman’s insubordination with Dr. Lew, Shuman literally ran down the hallway to beat him to Dr. Lew’s door, where he provoked a loud verbal argument with Plaintiff to divert him from meeting privately with Dr. Lew,” the complaint says.
GARAVAN CHALLENGED
Office “hostilities” spread during staff meetings where various office policies were discussed and Garavan “emphasized for the first time in years that the associate medical examiners needed to work their scheduled hours, following existing lab policies and procedures and meet the deadlines for their reports,” the complaint says.
With Lew choosing not to get involved, the professional staff, led by Shuman, “began to openly question” Garavan’s directives and resist his efforts to enforce office policies, the complaint says.
After a lab technician told Garavan about “improprieties” with subcontracted lab services provided by the University of Miami Tissue Bank (UMTB), owned since 2014 by the for-profit company Vivex Biologics Inc., he quickly informed Dr. Lew. She told him to investigate further and report back to her, the complaint says.
The technician produced an invoice for about $14,000 which she claimed Shuman owed her for the time she’d spent working on his private consult cases in the UMTB histology lab, the complaint says. Garavan also found more than 100 “blocks” with lab samples from Shuman’s private consult cases at the Office of the Medical Examiner. He told Lew he believed Shuman was violating the county’s “outside employment policies by concealing his improper use of county personnel and resources and failing to properly disclose the substantial income he was receiving from his private cases.” Lew told him not to confront Shuman until they had more information, the complaint says.
“Dr. Garavan was particularly concerned that given Dr. Lew’s lack of oversight on the hundreds of private cases being worked by Dr. Shuman, there was a significant risk that Shuman’s ‘private business’ may have involved the illegal harvesting of human tissue and even body parts for sale on the private market or in foreign countries where such practices are not as highly regulated,” the complaint says.
In Tuesday’s interview, Shuman strongly denied it. “That’s libel, you know. I contacted an attorney about suing for that, but it’s an allegation in a lawsuit and apparently you can’t sue over that,” he said.
Even so, the complaint says that in “February 2019 the Florida Medical Examiner’s Commission received an ‘unfavorable rating’ of the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s office from a local funeral home. The funeral director was concerned that the non-profit tissue donation program formerly run by the ME’s office was now contracted out to a for-profit company that was selling body parts.”
The complaint goes on to say that “When he expressed these very serious concerns to Dr. Lew and asked if he should report the information to OIG, Lew told him not to do anything else because she was going to investigate the issues herself with his assistance.”
Instead, the complaint says, Lew simply told Shuman and the director of the UMTB lab about what Garavan had told her and “accepted Dr. Shuman’s denial of any violations of the outside employment policies.”
‘RETALIATORY ATTACKS’
As a result, starting in early October 2017, Shuman “initiated/participated in a series of retaliatory attacks that included creating a hostile work environment by “aggressively verbally attacking Dr. Garavan in staff meetings, openly calling for his termination by attacking his competence in a child death case and encouraging Associate Medical Examiner Dr. Katherine Kenerson to file “false complaints” against Garavan, the complaint says.
Shuman told Florida Bulldog he never harrassed Garavan. “He became our supervisor and then started treating us like subordinates even though a number of us had been there for longer than he had,” Shuman said. “I wasn’t harrassing him. He was harassing all of us.”
Dr. Lew did nothing to stop what was happening, the complaint says. And while a review of the child death case later affirmed Garvan’s findings of a natural cause, Shuman’s private lobbying against Garavan led Lew to demote him back to associate medical examiner in November 2017, the complaint says.
In January 2018 Dr. Kenerson filed a hostile work environment complaint against Garavan with county HR that was later found to be factually unsupported, the complaint says. Garavan likened it to harrassment and is today suing Kenerson.
In March 2018, at the urging of Miami-Dade Assistant County Attorney Christopher Angel, Lew told Garavan to advise OIG about Shuman’s outside employment which he did by providing “statements, documents and photographs.”
Three years later, in March 2021, Inspector General Felix Jimenez released a report declaring that his office had found “lax managerial oversight” of Shuman who “is generating substantial sums of outside employment income that he consistently under-reported on mandatory annual financial disclosures over the course of several years.” The OIG also “substantiated several examples where Dr. Shuman used County equipment, materials, supplies and a vendor’s services for the benefit of his personal business ventures, the report says.
The report’s findings about Dr. Shuman’s non-compliance with the County’s outside employment provisions, which included several reforms that were later adopted, were given to Dr. Lew for administrative action. The case was also referred to the county’s ethics commission. Lew took no action and the ethics commission fined Shuman $500.
LEW FIRES GARAVAN
Meanwhile, HR’s probe of Dr. Kenerson’s complaint against Dr. Garavan was proceeding. And while the final report concluded that he had not violated any laws or county policies, it still asserted that while he was deputy chief Garavan had “engaged in conduct that should not be condoned” and recommended counseling and training in “harassment prevention, valuing diversity and workplace respect and civility.”
Garavan’s complaint says that was “consistent” with the HR investigator’s statement to him during an interview at the outset that the county was then under “tremendous public pressure from the ‘Me Too Movement’ to take disciplinary action in response to harassment complaints.”
Dr. Lew announced her retirement in early July 2021, four months after the release of the critical OIG report. She was succeeded as chief medical examiner by Dr. Kenneth Hutchins. Lew, set her last day as Aug. 31, 2021.
On July 12, Lew was deposed for six hours by Garavan’s lawyer, Christopher Sharp. On the morning of Aug. 30, the complaint says, Lew phoned Garavan at home and summoned him to a meeting with her and Hutchins, then her deputy, “where she summarily terminated his employment in writing, but without any explanation whatsoever of the basis or reasons for her unilateral decision.”
“Lew went out of her way to needlessly humiliate Plaintiff in front of his peers and co-workers by having armed security guard escort him from the building,” the complaint says.
Her decision, however, was later found by a three-person panel of arbitrators to have violated county policy by terminating Garavan’s employment in retaliation for protected activity, the complaint says.
Garavan’s $10 million lawsuit was already pending.
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