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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2014
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Home fire victim, 60, succumbs to injuries
Tuomey preps for its Friday hearing
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BY JOE KEPLER joe@theitem.com
BY MATT BRUCE matthew@theitem.com Lambert Green Jr. grew up the youngest of two children in a singlestory, wood-frame home along Floride Street in Sumter. His cousin, Morris Workman, grew up on the same street, and the two spent countless hours as kids hunting birds and squirrels in their neighborhood. On Tuesday, the two spent their final moments together as a house fire gutted Green’s childhood home and left the 60-year-old Sumter man charred with fatal injuries from which he died early Wednesday morning. “I grew up in that place,” Workman said. “My grandmother lived right next door, my uncle lived in the house right next to that one, and then my mother and I were in the next house down. So I’m lost right now.” The fatal blaze ignited just before 5 a.m. Tuesday. Green suffered burns to 40 percent of his body during the fire. The vicMORRIS WORKMAN tim was airlifted to Joseph M. Still Burn Center in Augusta, Georgia, on Tuesday. Sumter County Coroner Harvin Bullock said he died there just before 4 a.m. Wednesday. Bullock noted Green suffered cardiac arrest and cranial edema from the injuries he sustained in the fire. Pathologists are expected to perform an autopsy today. Workman returned to Sumter about five months ago after living for several years in Washington, D.C. He and Green lived together in the home at 616 Floride St. as Workman saved up to buy a nearby family business. Sumter fire authorities determined the blaze started from Green smoking in bed and accidentally igniting his mattress. It was a habit about which Workman said he often fussed at his cousin, cautioning him that he could burn the house down. Those warnings proved ominous this week. Green was awake when the fire initially began and was apparently confined to the mattress. Workman said he twice retrieved water for his cousin to douse the blaze. He said he
“It’s like Christmas around here,” said Susan Trautsch, the center’s administrative assistant. “You don’t know what a tremendous difference this makes.” The way it works is the corporate office donates $1,200 worth of materials, said Sam Corley, one of the coordinators for this year’s team. Then the local office supplies the manpower. The team also recruited eight local vendors to donate materials
Attorneys and representatives from Tuomey Healthcare System will attend a hearing Friday to find out the next chapter in a case that was first filed in 2005. The federal government accused the hospital of violating Stark Law, which governs physician self-referral for Medicare and Medicaid patients, and now faces the prospect of having to pay $237 million in federal fines which current president and CEO Michael Schwartz said in a September public forum were “impossible” to pay without facing SCHWARTZ bankruptcy. The nine-digit total was calculated by tripling the $39.3 million in unlawful Medicare claims the hospital received between 2005 and 2009, added on to a $5,500 penalty for each of the 21,730 false claims. Stark Law calls for a penalty between $5,500 and $11,000 for each count of fraud, meaning the fine could have been as much as $350 million if it had been fully enforced. “Tuomey is the appellant in a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals case which will be argued Friday morning in front of a three-judge panel,” Schwartz said in a statement to The Sumter Item. The hearing is expected to last about an hour. Tuomey Public Relations Director Brenda Chase said the hospital’s legal team will be appealing items from the first and second trials but could not be specific for legal reasons. She added a final decision of this appeal could take months and said a decision Friday is not expected. At the root of the argument is a 2005 contract the local hospital signed with 19 doctors, requiring the physicians to perform procedures only at Tuomey’s facilities. The government said that after agreeing to those terms, the doctors in question received a percentage of the money the hospital would receive from Medicare and private insurance companies through referral fees. Dr. Michael Drakeford was offered one of the contracts in question but declined and later reported the violations to
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SEE TUOMEY, PAGE A3
‘I’m just upset about my cousin. Lambert Green was a fine person. He was always honest. Just a good guy, generous and very nice.’
SEE GREEN, PAGE A7
MATT WALSH / THE SUMTER ITEM
Lowe’s Hero John Allison puts up a shutter on a window at Advocacy, Parenting and Pregnancy Resource Center in Sumter. The “heroes” were Lowe’s employees who took a vacation day and donated their time to fixing up the center.
Home-improvement ‘heroes’ spruce up pregnancy center BY JADE REYNOLDS jade@theitem.com A team of 17 volunteers descended on the Advocacy, Parenting and Pregnancy Resource Center on Wednesday to spruce up the place. The Sumter Lowe’s decided to use its 2014 Lowe’s Heroes grant on the nonprofit that aims to help women with unplanned pregnancies with a variety of free and confidential services.
Soldier sees breast cancer as another battle to fight BY JOE KEPLER joe@theitem.com “Oh, it must be the day for lumps.” It was not so much the gravity of the discovery that caused Sgt.
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1st Class Christine Taylor to be taken aback, but rather the flippant way her nurse informed her that she found a tumor. It was roughly a week later that the diagnosis came in, just nine days after her 36th birthday: It was stage
three breast cancer. Cancer.gov defines it as when “a tumor is larger than 5 centimeters and small clusters of cancer cells (larger than 0.2 millimeter but not larger than 2 millimeters) are found in the lymph nodes.”
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“OK, I guess that’s one way to tell me,” Taylor said with a laugh, remembering the day now one year removed. For the 17-year veteran of the
READ MORE Central Carolina Technical College raises awareness of disease. A2
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