3-Year-Old Dies After Trip to Dentist

When Ashley Boyle took her 3-year-old daughter to Hawaii's Island Dentistry for Children in November, she says she was told the child needed six fillings and four root canals. They returned for the root canals on Dec. 3; on Friday, Finley Boyle died, a month after suffering brain damage after the visit to Kailua dentist Dr. Lilly Geyer, reports CNN. The girl's parents plan to file a wrongful death suit, but Fox News picks up alleged details from an already filed negligence lawsuit. Per court documents, Finley was administered five sedatives and anesthetics, Demerol among them, and the "drugs given were as though given individually," reports KITV.

The family's lawyer alleges that Geyer had to leave her office and run to another part of the building to seek out a pediatrician who could perform CPR after Finley began to go into cardiac arrest; he claims the child went 26 minutes without anyone monitoring her. The suit claims Finley "suffered severe and permanent brain damage" due to the medications, and was left in a vegetative state—able to breathe on her own, but unable to survive without a feeding tube, which hospice doctors removed last week. Says the family's lawyer, per KHON, "I think the parents felt that Finley wouldn't want to live. I don't think any one of us would. She didn't know she was alive basically." Island Dentistry's website says the practice is closed for good. (More Finley Boyle stories.)