“It’s like a bad dream. It really is. Just that quick. It’s something that can’t be changed. At all.” – Derrick Hall, father of Nevaeh Hall.
4 year old Nevaeh Hall was taken to the dentist office to get a tooth pulled. Seven hours later, she came out with severe brain damage.
In early January 2016, Derrick Hall and Courissa Clark took their 4 year old daughter Nevaeh to Diamond Dental on Kuykendahl Road in Houston, TX. This was Nevaeh’s third visit and her parents hoped to get her tooth pulled or capped, due to tooth decay.
Dr. Bethaniel Jefferson had Nevaeh’s parents wait in the waiting room for what they thought would be a quick routine procedure. Two hours later, Clark heard screams from her daughter and walked towards the room where Dr. Jefferson was operating on Nevaeh. Clark recalls seeing her daughter kicking and swinging her arms:
“When I went back there and saw her, my first question was: ‘OK, do we need to call the ambulance or are you all going to call the ambulance?’
“And they said: ‘We’re just going to try to get her to calm down. We’re going to monitor her. We’re going to watch her. You guys have nothing to worry about, but we do need you all to wait in the waiting room and let her rest so she can walk back out of here.’”
“The whole time they just assured us that everything was OK”, said Clark in a press conference in March 2016.
Dr. Jefferson then placed Nevaeh in a child restraint known as a papoose that tightly constrains a child’s arms and legs to their body. Some even limit a child’s head and neck movement. Jefferson then used 5 sedatives to calm Nevaeh. That’s where she went terribly wrong.
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How is it that doctors need
4+3 yrs of special training to give sedatives in a hospital setting and you are letting someone with no experience sedate a child??? A dentist should treat teeth, not use sedatives.
I’m so sorry that you went through all u did at such a young age. You can’t see, eat, walk, talk, play, laugh …nothing! Its so sad! Its even more sadder that they give just anyone a license to do such a thing to a child! Meaning it or not, you have a license which means we trust you with our kid(s) not to take their entire life away and get away with it. If there are more dentist offices around using these medications and the same procedure? My advice is that they see what a stupid mistake you’ve done and that they learn from that. I have a 4 yr old daughter with 10 cavities, maybe even more… She has 2 broken teeth which one is starting to really bother her and it scares me, seeing this? Just made it harder for me to even make her a regular dentist appointment. I hope they resign you and take away all certificates and license you have because its clear NO ONE can trust you with ANYONE’S life. How do you even sleep at night? Knowing this poor girls parents can’t even read their baby girl a bedtime story because she can’t hear, can’t wait for her arms to wrap around there neck because she can’t even give them a hug. God works in mysterious ways, he is the healer of all healers, and she WILL be normal again. It might take a very long time but he’s coming to give her what someone has taken away from her..