June 3-6, 2022

There was no longer any reason to keep Dr. Parker in the ICU. On Friday, Mrs. Parker agreed to have him moved to a regular medical floor. The next day, a nurse asked whether she wouldn’t like to have him transferred to Phoebe’s hospice, which is set in a quiet, wooded area of northwest Albany. Its design was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, and it was named for William Harry Willson, the pecan magnate who’d first invited Dr. Parker to join the hospital’s board.

“This room was made for daddy,” Richard said when he walked in, marveling at the prints of World War II fighter planes on the walls and at the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto a patio, shaded by pine trees.

On Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Parker’s nephew brought ribs from the Parkers’ favorite barbecue restaurant in Columbus. Two friends, including a woman who’d worked as the executive assistant to Joel Wernick, the former CEO, joined for lunch. Pastor Daniel Simmons of Mt. Zion Baptist Church stopped by to pray. And then Mrs. Parker spoke by telephone with her daughters, giggling with them about the plans she’d made for that evening. The NBA finals were on television. She was going to put the game on and cheer for Steph Curry while cuddling beside her husband, as they’d done on so many date nights.

When Mrs. Parker scooted in the bed, Dr. Parker began to spasm. She hopped out and made a joke of the whole thing to the kids. “Can you believe your daddy kicked me out of the bed?” she texted. “I told him,‘That’s fine. I didn’t really want to sleep with you either.’”

After the game, she brushed her teeth and then sat next to the bed to pray. She started by thanking God for the time she’d had with Anthony and for whatever time they had left. “Let your will be done,” she said, “and allow us to be able to accept your will.” Then she looked up at her husband. He would have hated the way he looked, she thought; unbathed, mouth stuck open, face covered with stubble, a cold sore on his top lip. She whispered to him: “We’re going to be OK. Don’t worry about us.” Then she laid her head on his stomach and was lulled to sleep by the rise and fall of his breathing.

At about 1:30 in the morning, she woke up with a start. His stomach had stopped moving.

“Well, damn,” she whispered. For some crazy reason, she had held out hope that her husband would prove the doctors wrong.

She drew his South Carolina State blanket up over his chest, pulled out her phone and took a couple of pictures in case she wanted to remember the moment, in case there came a time when she’d want others to know.

Then she kissed him, told him she loved him and let the undertaker take him away.

A month later, the Albany City Commission convened to consider Phoebe’s appeal. Mayor Kermit “Bo” Dorough, who had long vowed to rein in Phoebe, oversaw the proceedings. I was watching the livestream but couldn’t see the crowd. Tucker and the mayor told me the room was packed.

Bryant Harden, a political science professor at Mercer University and chair of the preservation commission, spoke first to explain the group’s vote against demolition. Its majority wasn’t opposed to the construction of a nursing school, he said, but the hospital had so many places it could build the new campus without knocking down an important part of the city’s history. What was the harm in considering other options?

The Steiner who took the podium sounded different from the man I’d met during the pandemic. From his first words he was confrontational. He said there were “a few loud people in our country, our state of Georgia and here locally in Dougherty County and Albany that seek to keep us all divided.” The project’s opponents were pushing their “own selfish causes and not what’s in the best interests of our businesses, our people, our police, our region, our nurses, our schools, our churches and certainly not our community.”

When a city council member asked Steiner about the preservation commission’s plea to find an alternative location for the project, he thought for a second and said: “You know, if you just salvaged the front exterior or the whole building and created the world’s biggest liquor store, it would be OK with the HPC.”

Tucker told me people gasped — the proliferation of liquor stores in poor Black neighborhoods had long been a sensitive subject in Albany — and her hope for a new kind of leadership at Phoebe evaporated. She lamented that Steiner would take “such a cheap shot,” and added, “At that moment, he reminded me of Joel Wernick.”

I’ll admit that I gasped too — not just because it seemed like such a gratuitous comment; it was how it embodied the hospital’s conduct during the entire fight. At every turn, Phoebe sought to beat the preservationists into submission. Ultimately it worked. The City Commission, which includes the mayor, voted unanimously to approve the demolition. “We’ve only got one hospital,” Dorough told me, “and we’re not going to get another one.”

The preservationists took their fight to the Dougherty County Superior Court and found Phoebe’s reach extended even there. The chief judge recused himself because his daughter worked for the hospital. The next judge, who acknowledged that she served on a bank board with Steiner and Phoebe’s outside counsel, denied the preservationists’ request that she recuse herself and ruled in favor of the demolition.

If that wasn’t enough of a victory, the City Commission voted not to renew two of the four members who had opposed the demolition, prompting two other members to resign in protest. The city commissioners replaced them with four new members. One of them had financial ties to Phoebe, another to Albany Tech. A city commissioner told the Albany Herald that he “certainly wasn’t letting politics get in the way of my vote.” Another said, “We chose who we thought were the best.”

Then Albany and Phoebe turned on Tucker. She had come to the end of her first five-year term on the hospital authority and was up for reappointment, which required a vote by the county commission. Reappointment to the authority had previously been a perfunctory affair. All a sitting member needed to do was to tell the county that they were willing to serve again. Tucker was so sure of it that she didn’t attend the vote. Afterward, however, a clerk called to notify her that she hadn’t been renewed.

I asked a board member who served with Tucker about her removal. He told me that the hospital and the authority didn’t see her as a team player and wanted her off. “She was for sure not reappointed for that reason,” he said. “I have no doubt about that.” (When asked about Phoebe’s role in her departure, a hospital spokesperson said the Dougherty County Commission “has the sole responsibility of deciding whether to reappoint any member.”)

Several weeks later, Tucker addressed the county commission. She had no illusions about getting reinstated, and she had no intention of asking. Nervous and halting, she said that when she joined the hospital authority, she committed herself to serving the public, not Phoebe. The commission’s decision made her wonder whose team they were on. “An independent hospital authority board does not happen in a vacuum,” she said. “It cannot happen if members are removed from the board who question or who point out discrepancies. When they are removed from the board, you can expect that independence will end.”

August 2023

Shortly after her husband died, Mrs. Parker retained a lawyer named Adam Malone. She was prepared to sue, she told her kids, but she was hoping she wouldn’t have to. Malone had won some of the largest malpractice awards in Georgia’s history. But what appealed to Mrs. Parker was that although he lived in Atlanta, he had grown up in Albany. His father had been a prominent lawyer there in the 1950s and ’60s and was one of the few whites willing to collaborate with Black law firms and take on Black clients. If she sued, she believed, Malone would understand the forces he was up against and not be intimidated by them.

Mrs. Parker had no idea what had caused her husband’s death. None of the executives who had sat with her and her family at her husband’s bedside had called or visited to offer an explanation. She’d invited Steiner to speak at the funeral, but that was to keep up appearances. She took his invitation to attend a health system board ceremony in honor of Dr. Parker as evidence of his trying to do the same. Phoebe’s silence felt like a conspiracy. Even worse, at times, were calls from people she and Phoebe had in common. They always left her wondering whose side were they really on.

It was a question that nagged at her as she considered the lawsuit. She doubted that many of those people would stand with her if she sued — at least not publicly. People like Glenn Singfield, who would check in from time to time to see how she was doing and say how sorry he was about what had happened. She had every right to demand an explanation, he’d say, but she kept her plans to herself because as close as the two were, he was chair of the hospital authority.

The relationship with her husband’s successor at Albany Tech changed, too. He’d been her husband’s protégé, but the school needed the financial boost from its new partnership with Phoebe. She knew he couldn’t risk that project by calling out the hospital. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

I asked Mrs. Parker what she thought her husband would have done if he was alive and a different board member had died under the same circumstances. She said she would like to think that he would privately press the hospital for answers, but she doubted that he’d have questioned or criticized the hospital in public. Dr. Parker was a loyal member of the Phoebe family, she said, adding air quotes. Whenever the hospital had come under fire, he gave it the benefit of the doubt, partly because he didn’t want to be marked as a traitor, much less painted as a crank like the people behind Phoebe Factoids, and lose his place on the board, and partly because few people had ever taken on Phoebe and won.

“He wasn’t a naive man,” Mrs. Parker said, “but I think he drank the Kool-Aid.”

In August 2023, 14 months after Dr. Parker died, Mrs. Parker filed a lawsuit against both the hospital and the health system, as well as three members of the anesthesiology team involved in her husband’s operation, accusing them of negligence. She told me she wanted Phoebe to pay restitution to her and her children. She wanted answers about what caused his death, and she believed Phoebe wouldn’t give them to her unless it had to. She wanted to give her husband’s death, and her own future, some meaning. But there was something else. She worried about what message it would send if she didn’t sue: “I don’t want them to get away with it this time.”

He looked around at the soaring lobby in which we were sitting and talked about how the living and learning center would address one of the biggest drains on the hospital’s budget: traveling doctors and nurses. “People could question: ‘Why’d y’all spend money on this? Y’all spent $40 million, $45 million.’ And yeah, I can understand that, but I also know the cost and the impact of having a rotating staff and that it’s not good. It’s not good financially. It’s not good from a patient care standpoint. It’s not good for our community.”

He said that the nursing shortage at Phoebe was nowhere near what it had been during the pandemic, but that even as we spoke, half of the 500 job openings at the hospital were for nurses. When I asked whether that affected the quality of care, he said, “Absolutely, 100%.”

Speaking about the differences between staff nurses and travelers, he said, “We know that when it’s our own team, when it’s a Phoebe employee, there are less errors and quality’s higher, and we know when it’s contract nurses, there are higher errors, and our patients are less safe.”

I brought up the hospital’s persistently poor quality of care scores — that Phoebe still only had two stars from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and its grade from the Leapfrog Group, a coalition of large health insurers and leading patient safety experts, had gone down from an A in 2022 to a C in 2024 and remained there in 2025. The ratings reports indicated that the hospital had made improvements in crucial areas like sepsis prevention, but it continued to have trouble with readmission rates, accidental cuts and tears after surgery, bedsores and dangerous blood clots.

Steiner didn’t deny the findings but criticized them as unreliable because they’re based on data that is at least three years old. CMS’ ratings were particularly misleading, he said, because they included how patients feel about being in the hospital as well as how well a hospital follows standards of care — and no patient likes being in the hospital. “Consumers are inherently unhappy,” he said, “whether it’s Subway, whether it’s a gas station.”

I pressed him to clarify, because Subway sandwiches are different from readmission rates. “I’m just saying there are big chunks of these ratings, they’re saying patient safety is how good the food is,” he said.

When I returned to the hospital’s high readmission rates, Steiner retreated. “We have work to do, no doubt,” he said and then went back to laying the blame elsewhere. “Would I like to be a five star? Absolutely. But when you look at who four- and five-star hospitals are, they’re usually not in challenging communities that have a lot of poverty.”

That’s not entirely true. A good number of hospitals with three and four stars are in poor places. What Steiner said next made clear he knew that. “We’re not OK being a one- or two-star hospital,” he said. “We’re not OK being a C. Our community deserves for us to be better.”

Then I talked to Steiner about some of the patients whose stories I’d looked into during my time in Albany. I told him about LaTosha Almond having been sent home with a bedsore so severe she was readmitted to the hospital the day after she’d been discharged, then was sent home with a trach no one had taught her to manage and ultimately died. I also brought up the hospital groundskeeper I’d met at the Samaritan clinic and asked Steiner why he thought a man who worked for a safety-net hospital would have to turn to a free clinic for medical care?

Steiner seemed moved. He told me that he didn’t know Almond but that if what I’d told him was true, there was no excuse for what happened to her. As for the groundskeeper, he was troubled by that story, too. But he painted it as less an indictment of Phoebe and instead as “part of the brokenness in general of the health care system.” He said, “Even though I think we are a safety net — we’re an essential hospital for tens of thousands of people a year — a net still has openings.” He added, “I don’t think the health care system in the United States is set up to help him.”

After about two and a half hours, Steiner’s spokesperson reminded him it was time to wrap up. Before we did, I wanted to go back to something he’d said earlier. He’d told me that when it came to choosing which services Phoebe provides, he made the call, and he wasn’t afraid to be held responsible. What I asked him was: Who holds him to account?

He said something that surprised me. Or perhaps it was me not thinking of Phoebe the way it thinks of itself — as a business. “I hope that our consumers do, right?” he said. “They can do that by electing to get care elsewhere.”

What he didn’t say was that most people in Albany don’t have anywhere else.

A couple of days later, Steiner agreed to meet again. I wondered, with the passage of time, whether he regretted his liquor store comment during the Albany Middle School fight. But nope, he repeated it. “I could have opened Georgia’s largest liquor store, and that group didn’t care,” he told me. “They would’ve said, ‘We approve.’”

For his part, he’d been mulling over what I’d told him about the groundskeeper and the Samaritan clinic. “There’s a fine line between providing everything at no cost and at no responsibility and being able to run any business,” he said. “I think it’s just like somebody walking into a grocery store saying: ‘I’m hungry. My children are hungry. I’m malnourished, so I’m going to fill my cart up and I’m going to walk out.’ Where’s that balance, right?”

Yes, he said, the hospital’s mission is to provide care regardless of race, religion and ability to pay, “but we’re always trying to balance that out with paying the bills.” He added, “We’ve got human beings’ lives in our hands. Most days we get it absolutely correct, and some days we don’t.”

He reminded me that Phoebe had allowed the clinic to operate in one of the health system’s properties without charging rent. He said it had done so precisely because it understood there were uninsured people who might fall through the cracks. The clinic, he said, was not some separate safety net, it was part of Phoebe’s.

I asked Steiner whether he was aware that the net had collapsed: Samaritan’s offices and exam rooms had been so overtaken by mold that they’d been deemed unsafe and had been shuttered for more than a month.

A few days later, Nedra Fortson, the clinic’s administrator, called to tell me that Steiner had surprised her with a request to visit the facility. He did a walk-through and arranged for the clinic to move into another building.

Epilogue

In April, a Dougherty County jury awarded $70 million to a woman from nearby Camilla who had accused Phoebe and three Albany-area physicians of negligence. She charged that the doctors administered an overdose of blood pressure medications without adequate oversight for more than 40 hours. The blood flow to her extremities was severely constricted, she argued, and caused such irreparable damage to her legs they had to be amputated above the knee. She was 28 at the time.

Phoebe reached a settlement with her before the case went to trial. A spokesperson described what had happened to the patient as “undeniably tragic” but added that “the evidence indicates she would have died without the interventions provided by the care teams.” The physicians held out. They, too, asserted that they had saved the patient’s life. After the verdict — one of the largest in Georgia’s history — the doctors settled for an undisclosed amount.

I suspected that Phoebe would quickly settle the Parker lawsuit, making it almost impossible for the family to find out what had happened to Dr. Parker. Instead, the case stretched out for almost 20 months, with both parties gathering medical records and conducting depositions. What occurred during his ablation began to emerge. Most damning was a statement from Dr. José Ernesto Betancourt, the cardiologist who oversaw the procedure to correct Dr. Parker’s irregular heartbeat. He described Dr. Parker’s cardiac arrest as a “preventable event,” saying it happened “very unfortunately.”

According to the depositions, Dr. Parker’s blood pressure plummeted so low partway through the procedure that Betancourt paused to make sure that he hadn’t inadvertently punctured Dr. Parker’s heart. Once he determined that he hadn’t, he gave the nurse anesthetist, Alan-Wayne Howard, time to stabilize Dr. Parker with medication, then resumed the procedure, finishing a little before 4 p.m.

At this point, Howard took over Dr. Parker’s care. Neither he nor Betancourt were on staff at the hospital. Both were contract workers. Both lived hours away in Florida but stayed in Albany when on duty. It’s also important to know that Howard was a nurse practitioner, not a doctor. Nurse anesthetists — who have advanced degrees specializing in anesthesia care — are often used at hospitals and surgery centers as a way to cut costs or fill staffing shortages. Because they don’t have the same years of training as a physician, their work is usually done under supervision by an anesthesiologist, who is responsible for the care they provide. He is supposed to check in on them from time to time and is on call for any emergencies.

Betancourt testified that after the ablation Howard recommended sending Dr. Parker to the ICU for observation before removing his breathing tube and withdrawing anesthesia. He said Howard wanted to make sure Dr. Parker’s vital signs were stable before extubating him, and he also wanted Dr. Parker to have the medical support he needed if his blood pressure crashed. “We will need a couple of hours to be able to titrate down the medication to support the blood pressure until it can be completely withdrawn,” Betancourt recalled Howard saying.

Betancourt agreed with that plan, and he left the recovery room to talk to Mrs. Parker. He said he was gone for 10 minutes.

When he returned, at about 4:44 p.m., he said that he looked in again on Dr. Parker and found that Howard had changed the post-operative plan. The anesthetist had removed the breathing tube and begun withdrawing anesthesia. Betancourt said he was surprised but didn’t question the decision: It was Howard’s call to make. He said he asked how Dr. Parker was doing, and Howard assured him that “everything was great.” He left to start his report.

A minute later, Dr. Parker went into crisis. According to handwritten notes by Dr. Michael Coleman, one of the two anesthesiologists assigned to supervise Howard, Dr. Parker “developed bradycardia and hypotension, leading quickly to asystole.” In lay terms that meant that his heart rate and blood pressure plummeted, losing oxygen to his brain, until his heart eventually stopped.

In his deposition, Howard said that it wasn’t until 4:54 — nine minutes later — that he summoned Betancourt and Coleman for help. Betancourt said he was at Dr. Parker’s side at 4:55 — 10 minutes with little to no oxygen going to his brain — and began chest compressions. Coleman arrived a minute later and helped Howard reintubate Dr. Parker, whose heart began beating again at 5 p.m.

None of the doctors or nurses who testified could say exactly when Dr. Parker’s heart had stopped beating during that 15-minute window, which is why there was, and still is, confusion about whether his brain went without oxygen for five or 14 minutes. When asked whether her record was reliable, the nurse assigned to keep track of the time testified that “based on my documentation, I don’t think they have an accurate time. No.”

Howard wasn’t asked during his deposition about why he’d decided to remove respiratory and blood pressure support earlier than initially planned. (His deposition occurred months before Betancourt’s.) However, Howard did let on that he was in a hurry that afternoon. He said that he had hoped to tend to his elderly father in Florida and that Dr. Parker’s procedure went on for so long that he was running late.

In its initial response to the lawsuit, Phoebe argued that because the health system did not employ “any nurse, physician or advanced practice provider” involved in Dr. Parker’s care, it was not liable for his death. It’s an argument that many hospitals make when they are sued and traveling nurses and doctors are involved. Howard denied that he was negligent “in any manner whatsoever.”

This summer, Phoebe, the two supervising anesthesiologists and Howard settled for an undisclosed sum. The three clinicians declined to comment. A Phoebe spokesperson said: “While rare, complications like those that occurred in this case are possible with a cardiac ablation. The care provided in this instance matched the standard of care that should be expected, and we do not believe there is evidence of negligence or malpractice.”

As part of the agreement, Mrs. Parker promised not to disclose the sum but made clear that she was relieved that she and the hospital had come to terms before Georgia capped malpractice awards at $1.05 million. By this time Mrs. Parker had moved to South Carolina, where she could be closer to her siblings.

Before leaving Albany, she’d hired painters to help get her house ready to put on the market. The crew’s chief came to the door to express his condolences. He knew a little something about her pain, he said.

His 35-year-old brother had recently died from sepsis at Phoebe and left him and his family with a lot of questions. Mrs. Parker asked whether they had tried to get answers. The painter shrugged and shook his head no. When she asked him why not, he said, “What good would it do? It’s Phoebe.”

How We Reported This Story

Ginger Thompson interviewed more than 150 current and former residents of Albany, Georgia, as well as more than 75 current and former staff members of Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital and Phoebe Putney Health System. She consulted with dozens of public health professionals, medical and legal experts, health care economists and strategists, and historians. Two of those interviewed, Demetrius Young and Nathaniel Smith, have since died.

To reconstruct Sandra Parker’s experiences before, during and after the surgery of her husband, Anthony Parker, Thompson drew from extensive interviews with her and her children as well as from texts, emails, medical records and depositions.

She and Doris Burke reviewed the minutes of the hospital’s board as well as those of the Hospital Authority of Albany-Dougherty County. They examined text messages and emails; medical records; nonprofit IRS filings; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data; census records; Georgia public and community health data; Georgia death records; tax assessor data; federal and state court filings; federal, state and local campaign contribution filings; municipal bond offering documents; and bond rating agency reports.

Story Credits

Creative direction, design and development by Anna Donlan. Visual editing by Alex Bandoni. Videos by Katie Campbell and Almudena Toral. Audio produced by Katherine Wells and Theater of War Productions.

Additional Credits

Additional video editing by Gerardo del Valle/ProPublica. Hospital research by Russell Autry. Parker family photos courtesy of Sandra Parker. Display typeface by Vocal Type.