A year after a grand jury declined to indict her for the felony charge of abuse of a corpse after she suffered a miscarriage, Brittany Watts is suing the Warren, Ohio hospital, medical staff and police who she claims deprived her of urgently needed medical care and conspired to persecute her instead. In her federal lawsuit filed in an Ohio District Court on January 10, Watts, 34, says when she went to the St. Joseph Warren Hospital in September of 2023, 21 weeks pregnant, bleeding and in medical distress, a doctor diagnosed her as having a placental abruption, which he said endangered her pregnancy. But after the hospital failed to treat her for eight hours, she returned home. Brittany Watts (Credit: Video Screengrab Fox8) The delay was so the hospital’s ethics board could determine the course of treatment, her then-attorney Tracy Timko later told The New York Times. St. Joseph had a policy against attempting to sustain the life of a 21-week-old fetus, and under Ohio law, a pregnancy is viable at 22 weeks. Watts came back to the hospital the next morning, in pain, to learn that her water had broken and that her fetus was non-viable. Doctors also concluded that she was “at high risk of bleeding and/or of a serious infection that could kill her,” according to a medical note they posted, the complaint says. Doctors decided to induce labor immediately, rather than risk hemorrhage, sepsis or death. They did not offer Watts the option of a dilation and evacuation (D & E) procedure, which is quicker and does not involve labor and delivery, and what she preferred. This failure violated the medical standard of care, her attorneys argue. But after waiting for another 10 hours with “effectively no treatment,” Watts again went home, “confused, tired, scared, frustrated,” the complaint says. Before dawn on September 22, she miscarried into her bathroom toilet. She says she “saw the toilet was full of tissue, blood and blood clots.” She heard no sound, saw no fetus or movement, or anything to suggest she had delivered a living fetus, and “indeed she had not,” the complaint states. Afterwards, she flushed the toilet, which then began to overflow. She scooped up the overflowing content with a bucket. Unbeknownst to her, the fetus, which was under one pound and had died in utero, was intact and had become lodged in a pipe in the toilet. Still bleeding, she returned to the hospital and was admitted for a third time. Despite knowing that her pregnancy had been non-viable and that she had delivered a fetus with no chance of survival, Connie Moschell, a nurse, “decided to call police to falsely report that Watts had committed a crime.” While laying in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV and awaiting urgent treatment, Warren police detective Nicholas Carney, Moschell, and Jordan Carrino, another nurse, “conspired to interrogate Ms. Watts and accuse her of harming the fetus,” working together “to fabricate evidence to falsely implicate” her in criminal conduct, the lawsuit alleges. Moschell first told the hospital’s risk management department that Watts had given birth at home to a viable, live baby and had left the live baby in a bucket, the complaint says. Carrino “fanned the flames “by writing a medical note saying Watts had seen and touched the fetus before putting it in the bucket.” Moschell then told police of “the need to locate the fetus,” according to a coroner’s report. The police found the fetus clogged in her bathroom toilet and took the entire toilet out of her home to the morgue to retrieve the fetus, the Times reported. The two nurses and the police detective interrogated Watts for over an hour, the lawsuit claims, telling her multiple times she “was not in trouble” and offering “false promises of leniency.” “The nurse was rubbing my back, comforting me, telling me everything was going to be okay,” Watts said in a press release released by her attorneys at Chicago-based law firm Loevy + Loevy this week. “Little did I know, that nurse was the one who called the police.” The complaint says the detective and nurses asked Watts leading and suggestive questions eliciting statements that Carney would later misrepresent to use against her in criminal proceedings. They twisted her words to suggest that she had birthed a live baby, taken the fetus out of the toilet and put it in the bucket, and purposefully omitted her statements that she had not seen the fetus and believed that it had come out “in bits and pieces.” On October 4, after an autopsy revealed the fetus had died in utero, Carney filed charges in Warren Municipal Court for felony abuse of a corpse. He arrested Watts the next day at her home, handcuffing her in her driveway. She was taken to the police station, arraigned, and was “devastated” to learn that she faced up to a year in prison “for experiencing a medical trauma through no fault of her own,” the complaint says. “Defendants’ treatment of Ms. Watts compounded the trauma of her pregnancy loss and denied her the ability to mourn that loss on her own terms.” Word of her arrest and the private details of her medical trauma spread quickly in the news and on social media, the complaint says, and Watts was harassed by phone calls at all hours. Her case became widely known and debated nationally, arising not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, ending the constitutional right to abortion, and casting uncertainty into how health care providers and courts should handle medically complicated pregnancies and involuntary terminations such as that experienced by Watts. Months later, in January of 2024, a Trumbull County grand jury reviewed the evidence and declined to indict Watts. The prosecutor, Dennis Watkins, released a statement saying his office had found that Watts had not violated the law as claimed and that he agreed with the grand jury. After celebrating her legal victory, Watts attended Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March of 2024 as a guest of Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio. Watts told reporters at the time that, after the grand jury did not indict her, “I made the conscious decision that I wanted no other woman to go through what I went through because I wanted my vindication to speak as loud as the accusation.” Her lawsuit says while the criminal case has concluded, Watts has not recovered. In violation of state and federal laws, she suffered false arrest and malicious prosecution, deprivation of liberty, reputational harm, financial loss, loss of privacy, public humiliation, distress, pain and suffering. Defendants’ failures to treat her medical condition in a timely manner caused her extreme physical harm, including pain, severe bleeding and infection, as well as severe emotional distress, she asserts. The complaint claims that Carney, Moschell and Carrino engaged in conspiracy while acting in concert to deprive Watts of her constitutional rights to be free from unreasonable seizure and prosecution without probable cause, as demonstrated by their alleged fabrication and reporting of false evidence, and making false promises of leniency during her interrogation. It further contends that St. Joseph Warren Hospital and its owner Bon Secours Mercy Health violated the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act by failing to stabilize her emergency medical condition when she arrived at the hospital and denying her care over the next two days, worsening her medical crisis. Watts is also suing obstetrician Parisa Khavari for medical negligence for delaying her treatment and for disparaging her to medical staff. Watts seeks a jury trial to determine compensatory damages against the defendants, individually and jointly. “Any system that would turn away a pregnant woman in crisis, and then attempt to punish her for managing her traumatic condition alone, is irretrievably broken,” said Renee Spence, one of Watts’ attorneys, in the release. “But the defendants in this case underestimated Brittany. She’s resilient, she’s a fighter, and she’s determined to use this tragedy to hold the wrongdoers accountable and to create systemic change.” Warren Police Chief Eric Merkel told Fox 8 News in Cleveland that the department “will not be providing a statement” about the lawsuit. Meanwhile, officials at Mercy Health released this statement: “We remain steadfast in our mission and our commitment to the patients and communities we serve with compassion and integrity. Due to patient privacy, Mercy Health will not discuss these legal proceedings.” ‘Confused’: Black Ohio Woman Charged After a Nurse Called Police Falsely Claiming She Left a Live Baby In a Bucket During Miscarriage At Home Is Suing Hospital, Police for Inflicting Trauma