West Suburban Medical Center ownership settled a lawsuit with the family of a woman who “decomposed” in the hospital’s morgue as the hospital’s cooling system failed.
The hospital agreed to a $110,000 total payout to the woman’s children on June 12, 2025, according to Cook County Court records. The case is just one in a slew of serious legal matters related to the hospital’s operations to have hit the county court system since the embattled Resilience Healthcare took over management of the now-closed safety-net hospital three-and-a-half years ago.
The hospital closed in late March, with ownership citing a revenue collapse tied to the failure of the hospital’s billing system. A Cook County judge’s decision on whether the potential reopening of the hospital will be put in the hands of a court-appointed receiver is expected later this week.
The family had filed the lawsuit in November of 2024, alleging that the Oak Park hospital had failed to maintain safe temperatures in the morgue and autopsy suites in the days after the woman’s death or notify the woman’s family of the body’s condition.
Eva Golabek, attorney for the family, declined to comment on the what she described as a closed matter. Representatives for Resilience declined to comment on what they described as “pending litigation.”
The woman died on Dec. 17, 2022, just over two weeks after Resilience Healthcare assumed full control of the hospital from previous owners Pipeline Health, according to the lawsuit. When the woman’s funeral director came to collect her body on Dec. 21, he discovered that “she had brown liquid oozing from her body” and that her face was “severely deformed, decomposed, and with skin loosened from the underlying tissue,” according to the lawsuit.
The family could not proceed with an open casket wake or funeral due to the body’s condition, and “a strong odor of decomposition emanated from the casket,” during the woman’s funeral, according to the lawsuit.
Resilience CEO Manoj Prasad had reportedly directed hospital staff to keep bodies cool by placing “large garbage bags of ice” directly on top of corpses, the complaint said. The woman’s face had become deformed after her death due to a heavy bag of ice that was placed directly on top of her, according to the complaint.
West Sub staff had hung a paper sign in the morgue that reportedly said, “DO NOT PLACE ICE ON FACE OF DECEASED,” according to the complaint.
West Suburban Medical Center closed its doors March 27, citing a year-long failure in the hospital’s electronic medical record billing system that resulted in as much as 90% of its work going unbilled. About two weeks later, some limited patient care services reportedly resumed at West Sub’s Oak Park campus, according to Prasad.
West Sub, a century-old Oak Park institution, closed several months after its Resilience-owned sister hospital Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood closed its doors last August. Any attempt at reopening the hospitals will happen in the shadow of several other recent legal issues, including multiple cases tied to outstanding payments owed to hospital vendors and a case between Resilience and Pipeline over tens of millions of dollars reportedly owed to the previous owner from the 2022 sale of the hospitals.
In April, the hospitals’ co-owner and landlord Rathnaker Reddy Patlola filed a suit against Prasad for seven counts of breach of contract, seeking to recover over $24 million in unpaid rent and fees for Resilience-owned buildings. Prasad’s own lawsuit claims that Patlola had “sabotaged” the hospitals and tried to illegally evict him last month.