The head of the emergency department at a Manhattan hospital committed suicide after spending days on the front lines of the coronavirus battle, her family said Monday.
“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” Dr. Philip Breen told the New York Times of his physician daughter, Lorna Breen, who had been the medical director of the New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital amid the pandemic.
The father said his 49-year-old daughter, who died Sunday, had no history of mental illness. But he said that the last time they spoke, she told him how excruciating it was to have to continually watch contagion patients die, including some even before they could be taken from the ambulance.
“She was truly in the trenches on the front line,” Philip Breen told the Times.
“Make sure she’s praised as a hero,” he added. “She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died.”
Lorna Breen died in Charlottesville, Va., where she’d been staying with her family, the father said.
He said she had gotten sick with the virus while on the job at one point but returned to work after about a week and a half of recuperating. Still, the hospital sent her home again, and her family brought her to Virginia.
Two days before the doctor’s suicide, a city EMT also toiling on the front lines of the city’s battle against the virus took his own life.
Rookie paramedic John Mondello, 23, used a gun registered to his father, a retired NYPD cop, to kill himself along a river wall on Shore Boulevard in Astoria, Queens, on Friday, police sources told The Post at the time.
He graduated from the Fire Department’s EMS Academy in early February, then headed straight to EMS Station 18 in Claremont in The Bronx — which handles one of the biggest 911 call volumes in the city.
Sources:
Heavy: Dr. Lorna M. Breen: New York City ER Medical Director Dies by Suicide
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