A reportedly terminally-ill patient of the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital has committed suicide by jumping out a window two stories up.
On Sunday, March 21, the Crimes Investigation Branch at 2:20 a.m. received a call that a half an hour before, Kent Ocean, 50, a construction worker and fisherman of Belize City, who was also a patient of the KHMH, apparently leapt out of the medical ward window, located on the second floor of the hospital.
This act of desperation has left not only the staff of the hospital shaken, but the family of the deceased, as well. Ocean, a father of nine, was found partially nude, with only a black shirt on his body, facing downward onto the concrete surface outside of the hospital, where upon impact, he sustained fatal injuries.
Ocean bled profusely from the back of the head, and family members also noted injuries visible on the left side of the face and the mouth.
KHMH’s Medical Chief of Staff, Dr. Bernard Bulwer, at 1:40 the same morning, pronounced Ocean dead, after inspecting his body.
According to a press release sent out by KHMH, Ocean was admitted to the hospital on March 11 at around 2:00 p.m. He was put in the medical ward inside Isolation Room #1 and assigned to bed number 25, where he was prior to the incident.
The terminal illness from which Ocean was said to have been suffering has remained unspecified.
Amandala spoke to Ocean’s common-law wife of 14 years, Juliet Jones, 31, a resident of Belize City and the mother of Ocean’s nine children. Still in a state of shock, Jones told us that the last time she saw her husband was on the fourteenth, which was last Sunday.
“I would have never expected him to do something like that; he was not the type of person you would suspect was capable of suicide. He never even hinted about any such thoughts. . . . The last time I saw him he was talking, and he didn’t seem upset or in too much pain,” Jones explained.
She said that on the fourteenth when she visited Ocean, “He looked good; he was eating and he kept asking for barbeque. It seemed like he was doing a lot better than previously,” regardless of the fact that he was set to undergo an operation that same Sunday to extract water that had accumulated in his lungs.
Jones also noted that she, along with her sister, Melva Godfrey, 38, waited for the doctor to come and perform the water extraction, but “the doctor never showed up.”
She said that because she had to take care of the children, and because of a lack of transportation, she could not take more frequent trips to the hospital.
According to this devastated family, Ocean had been in and out of the hospital for some time now, but had just recently been admitted to KHMH since March 11. “He was sick,” the common-law wife said.
Jones also told Amandalathat she had not been informed of her husband’s passing until 11:00 the Sunday morning, by Ocean’s other family members.
With her eldest child, 14 and youngest a year old, Jones struggles to deal with the reality of her husband’s death. She has some questions for the hospital authorities, such as, “Where was the nurse?! How could somebody NOT notice what was happening?”
The family also had this to say about some of the hospital’s staff: “No assistance or supervision—when you try to tell the nurse that the person needs this or that, the time they take to come and see what is wrong, anything could happen between that time.”
KHMH’s CEO, Francis Gary Longsworth, when asked how many workers were present in the ward at the time of the incident, reported that there were five nurses as well as a physician assigned to the medical ward that said morning.
The name of Ocean’s last known physician has been withheld, as personnel of the hospital state that they are not at liberty to disclose any more information regarding the suicide.