12 JANUARY 26-FEBRUARY 1, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | that Lambros had been arrested after an investigation that began that summer, when he’d been spotted taking an explicit selfi e with an exposed patient. At the sight of Lambros’s mug shot, “I recognized him and was like, ‘Oh, my God!’” K.M.’s husband says. “I looked at my wife and said, ‘That’s the weird bastard in your room that I told you about.’ And she started mentally spinning in circles.” She’s far from the only patient sedated at the hospital over the past few years to have such a reaction. On December 20, when Denver-based Rathod Mohamedbhai LLC fi led its initial suit against St. Mary’s and its owners, SCL Health and Utah’s Intermoun- tain Healthcare, two victims were listed as plaintiffs — women identifi ed as J.V. and M.C. But in an amended complaint fi led on January 24, the total, including K.M., is up to fi fteen. Attorney Siddhartha Rathod expects this number to keep increasing. After all, Lambros worked at St. Mary’s for more than a decade; he was hired in June 2012 and fi red on October 25, 2022, in the wake of his arrest. Moreover, many women who may have been sexually assaulted while they were insentient don’t remember what, if anything, happened to them, and it’s unclear how many illicit actions Lambros may have recorded. Thus far, Rathod says, his fi rm’s inves- tigation into Lambros has substantiated approximately four terabytes of data origi- nating from his devices; that translates to approximately 700,000 cell-phone photos or 65,000 hours of cell-phone videos. But law enforcement has successfully accessed only a handful of clips to date. Perhaps the most shocking is one in which Lambros whispers to the camera, “Don’t ever get rid of these videos. ... You need to keep them forever. ... This is your Dexter collec- tion” — a reference to the Dexter books and TV series, about a serial killer who took personal items from each victim to remind him of his crimes. Rathod also points out that “Lam- bros had ample opportunity to destroy video evidence,” since months passed between the fi rst alert about the selfi e and the day he was busted. “And we have an expert who tells us people like Lambros don’t start collecting and fi lming videos,” he adds. “They start with peeping, and then they move on from peeping to touching over clothes to looking under clothes to touching under clothes. They don’t get to pho- tographing and videos until much later. And we also know there’s one victim in the case from 2016. So it’s highly un- likely that the majority of those videos weren’t destroyed. Many people will never know what happened to them.” St. Mary’s certainly doesn’t exude the type of evil of which Lambros is accused. It’s among the most important and respected institutions in western Colorado, as I know from personal experience. I’m a Grand Junction native, and St. Mary’s has been significant to me since my fi rst breath: I was born there. And the connections between my wife’s family and the hospital, which the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth established in 1896, go much deeper. Her physician grandfather moved to Grand Junction in the late 1940s and secured an offi ce a block or so from a previous St. Mary’s location, near downtown, because he served so many patients there. His son, my wife’s father, followed the same path, becoming a family doctor and establishing a practice in Grand Junction in 1965. My wife was four years old at the time, and in a very real sense, she grew up at St. Mary’s, whose main building at 2635 North Sev- enth Street remains the centerpiece of a medical campus that’s expanded ex- ponentially in the past half-century. She used to accom- pany her dad to the hospital when he made his rounds, hanging out at the nurses’ station or playing with the cords on the old- fashioned switch- board. In the months before her freshman year at Kansas’s Uni- versity of St. Mary, created by the same Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth that founded St. Mary’s, she landed a part-time job operating that very switchboard, and she took shifts over sub- sequent summers and even the occasional weekend after she transferred to Western State College in Gunnison. In 1982, my wife’s father succumbed to diabetes at age fi fty, shortly after tak- ing part in the experimental trial of a new insulin pump — an apparatus that’s now become standard. He died at St. Mary’s, as did my own father many years later, in 2009. Around that time, his widow, my wife’s mother, began working in the medi- cal records department and continued to do so until two weeks before she lost her fi ght with cancer in 2018. By then, St. Mary’s boasted Grand Junc- tion’s tallest structure — a tower renovated in 2010 tops out at 146 feet — and its stature is symbolic of the hospital’s powerful role in the local economy. After years of fi nancial ups and downs epitomized by “Black Sun- day” — the day in May 1982 when Exxon killed the local oil-shale business by laying off 2,200 employees — Grand Junction began marketing itself as a destination for retirees thanks to its temperate climate, beautiful scenery, fi rst-rate airport, quaint shopping district and excellent health care, anchored by St. Mary’s. The tactic worked: In June 2022, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine placed Grand Junction in the number-two po- sition on its list of standout places to retire, and St. Mary’s is prominently name-checked in its explanation for this ranking. Today the area has many medical fa- cilities, but St. Mary’s transcends the cat- egory. According to the Grand Junction Economic Partner- ship, the hospital is the community’s second-largest em- ployer, behind only the Mesa County Valley School Dis- trict, and the merger of SCL Health — the Kansas nonprofi t whose name references its founders — and Intermountain, which became offi cial last April, could well produce even more jobs. At age 127, St. Mary’s seems primed for bigger things. But as the hospital was growing, some- thing awful lurked in the shadows. In June 2022, after what may have been a dangerous reaction to blood-pressure medi- cation, lawsuit plaintiff J.V. was on the brink of death. “My airway collapsed and my throat swelled shut,” she says. “I started at a differ- ent hospital, but they couldn’t care for me, so they sent me to St. Mary’s. When I arrived there, I’d already been intubated and was on life support.” Survival was by no means assured, and J.V. remained in the hospital’s intensive care unit for more than a week under heavy sedation. “I was alone down there for eight days,” she says, in part because Lambros, during a phone call, had discouraged visits from her mother; she lived an hour away from the hospital, and he said a trip would be useless since her daughter was unconscious. Nevertheless, J.V. recalls, “I knew he was doing something to me. But in my head, I was like, ‘I’m in the hospital. This can’t happen in a hospital.’” A sense of foreboding about Lambros still lingered when she awakened in early July. “Every time he’d come in, I’d get a taste and smell in my mouth, and I didn’t like it,” J.V. says. “So I knew something wasn’t right, and I fl at-out told my mom he was bad and for him to stay away.” In fact, J.V. refused care from all nurses affi liated with St. Mary’s until her discharge fi ve days later — yet shortly thereafter, the bills started arriving. She was hit with monthly payments of $905 toward a total fee of $32,000. Then, in late October, she got a call from St. Mary’s representatives informing her that Lambros had been arrested. “I didn’t know I was a victim,” she stresses, “and they said they weren’t sure. I didn’t fi nd out until November, when I met with the DA [Mesa County Dis- trict Attorney Daniel Rubinstein], that I was.” Videos from June 24 and June 25 of Lambros abusing an unconscious J.V. were recovered by the Grand Junction Police De- partment. The clips are graphically described in an arrest affi davit and include the snippet featuring the Dexter collection remark. Learning what had happened to her when she was defenseless has been incredibly harmful to J.V., she says: “It’s very hard to want to call a doctor or be around any medi- cal people. I’m on anti-depressants, anxiety medication, and I just know I can never get back what he took. Not having control and somebody using your body when you have no say is just so wrong.” Meanwhile, J.V. was still being billed by St. Mary’s. The payments weren’t canceled until after the lawsuit was fi led. The complaints maintain that St. Mary’s, SCL Health and Intermoun- tain Healthcare are “vicariously liable” for Lambros’s crimes. One reason for that, attorney Rathod says, is that “the hospital had been on notice of the risk of patients being sexually assaulted” since at least April 11, 2017, when Adam Stice, a visitor to the hospital, was wit- nessed fondling and photographing a woman in the medical center’s emer- gency room without her consent. Stice was arrested and ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison for assault and unlawful sexual conduct, and a lawsuit over the incident was fi led against St. Mary’s in 2018; it was settled for an undisclosed amount. Rathod believes that “this individual was caught because of cameras in the room — and St. Mary’s has cameras throughout the entire hospital,” along with a tracking system linked to employee badges that lets supervisors see where staffers are at all times. “Many of our clients’ rooms had cam- eras, and there are cameras in the hallways of St. Mary’s, too. But either the cameras weren’t hooked up or St. Mary’s wasn’t watching” when Lambros was abusing patients, he suggests. St. Mary’s continued from page 11 continued on page 14 St. Mary’s has been sued by patients who say they were sexually assaulted by Lambros. Christopher Lambros was arrested last fall. MICHAEL ROBERTS GRAND JUNCTION POLICE DEPARTMENT