The clinic and nurse practitioner sued in a February murder-suicide in which a Byron mother killed her four daughters then herself denied wrongdoing Friday, saying their actions — including reportedly prescribing her ketamine — were not below the standard of care.
That comes on the heels of a legislative committee deciding last month not to advance a bill that would have required coroners to include psychiatric drug toxicology in their public reports on any violent death.
As the law is now, coroners have only to publish “relevant toxicology” on their public case reports.
The Lawsuit
Rhonda Coplen, mother of Tranyelle Harshman, filed a civil lawsuit against Cody-based Sage Psychiatry Services LLC and against advanced practice registered nurse Krista Blough in September on claims that Blough sent Harshman home with ketamine.
Coplen’s lawsuit claims Blough knew of Harshman’s PTSD and post-partum depression and administered ketamine to her as psychiatric treatment.
Harshman, 32, shot her four young daughters, called 911, then turned the gun on herself Feb. 10 in her home in residential Byron.
The Big Horn County Coroner found ketamine, which is an anesthetic, and clonazepam, which is an anti-anxiety drug, to be “relevant toxicology” and included those in Harshman’s public death docket. So their presence in her system became public record under the current law.
The Answer
In an answer filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for Wyoming, the clinic and Blough denied violating civil laws, and said their actions did not fall below the standard of care in this case.
The complaint doesn’t link its claims to relevant laws, the clinic and Blou “did not cause” the harms to the family, and there may have been other, pre-existing conditions and intervening causes in this situation, the answer says.
“The Decedent was adequately informed of the risks, benefits and alternatives of the treatment and gave (her) consent based on that information,” the answer says, adding that Harshman “assumed the risk of treatment,” and that her treatments were “common treatments and were supported by a ‘respectable minority’ of medical professionals.”
The clinic’s attorney, Andrew Carafelli of Englewood, Colorado-based law firm Harris, Karstaedt, Jamison & Powers, declined Monday to comment in addition to the filed answer.
Meanwhile, Lawmakers
The Wyoming legislative Labor, Health and Social Services Committee on Oct. 17 considered — and ultimately rejected — a bill proposed by Rep. Paul Hoeft, R-Powell, that would have made the full concentrations of psychiatric drugs, rather than just those deemed “relevant,” public record under state law.
The bill would have required coroners to make a detailed narrative about the drug’s role in each violent fatality.
It also would have required coroners to send those toxicology metrics to the Wyoming Department of Health, the Wyoming violent death reporting system and the national violent death reporting system.
It would have allowed public health systems and lawmakers to review that toxicology data, and would have required the Wyoming Department of Health to compile the data into a report and send it to lawmakers at least once a year.
Any coroner or public official who failed to comply with the act could face up to six months in jail and $500 in fines.
The committee declined to adopt the bill when none of the members present asked to move the bill for a vote after Laramie County Coroner Rebecca Reid, the mother of a child who died by suicide, and others criticized it as invasive and poorly written.
One virtual attendee, Sheila Matthews of AbleChild, countered, saying Wyoming deserves to know how involved psychiatric drugs are in mass shootings and other violent deaths — and that transparency is key to that.
“The goal is to increase transparency and accountability by revealing whether mind-altering drugs played a role in violent acts such as mass shootings, informing public safety,” said Matthews.
She took issue with earlier testimony by Reid in which the coroner said, “If someone is taking their medication like they’re supposed to, 10-to-1 they’re not going to die by suicide.”
Reid also said that 98% of Laramie County suicide cases involve drugs and alcohol. Whether prescription drugs counteract with other medications, “unfortunately, that’s not my job as a coroner to say.”
Matthews countered, saying it’s difficult to tell whether people can avoid suicide by taking their prescribed medication without data that could speak to whether those prescriptions may cause suicide.
“We’re not asking the coroner to do a causality report here,” said Matthews. “It’s data we’re asking for.”
A Technical Point
Franz Fuchs, deputy director of the Wyoming Department of Health, noted a technical concern with the bill: Wyoming produces small datasets in the case of murder/suicides specifically, so its publicly available statistics will be easy to link to certain cases via news reports.
And those data might also be too few to yield proof of causation.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
