Pets' Deaths Leave Vet Clinic in Limbo

By ANNE-MARIE O’CONNOR

June 25, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

During what should have been a routine spaying of a dog named Jasmine, something went terribly wrong.

Stacey Herro, manager of the city of Los Angeles’ North Central spay and neuter clinic, “came running out and said they’d almost lost the dog,” said Phyllis Daugherty, then a clinic volunteer. “She was very worried about the dog.”

But Jasmine’s owner, Phil Frierson, said that when he came to pick up his dog a few hours later, the clinic’s veterinarian, Dr. Tomasz Krzysztofik, gave him some antibiotics and said to take Jasmine home. The next day, the dog he adopted as a cuddly abandoned puppy died as he rushed her to an animal hospital, Frierson said.

“If he would have just said, ‘You need to take her to a vet or a doctor,’ that’s what I would have done,” Frierson said. “Thinking about it just chokes me up. She was a good dog. She suffered a whole lot.”

Today, the fate of the clinic at 3201 Lacy St. is in limbo, at least under the management of the Las Vegas nonprofit firm Animal Foundation International, that had run it for the city under contract since December, according to Los Angeles Animal Services spokesman Jeff Prang.

Foundation board member Richard Herro, Stacey’s father, said the clinic is being sabotaged by disgruntled, dismissed employees and animal organizations competing with the foundation for fund-raising dollars.

“There is an obvious agenda,” he said. “We’re anxious for the truth to get out. We would like to continue, but we need cooperation.”

The controversy came to a head with Krzysztofik’s resignation May 7 and the revelation of a blistering internal report on the clinic by the city’s chief veterinarian, Dr. Dena Mangiamele, that recounted what appeared to be an accidental strangling of a dog that allegedly died as it struggled with a technician.

The Los Angeles Animal Services Department planned to reopen the clinic by June 15, but City Councilman Richard Alarcon asked for a moratorium on using the foundation’s services pending a thorough investigation of up to seven deaths there, Prang said. The council Public Safety Committee is to review the matter Monday.

“We needed to hold off until we were sure this was a qualified firm,” Alarcon said.

If there were no moratorium, Prang said, “we would be proceeding with the reopening of the clinic. We concluded it was appropriate to reopen.”

Philanthropist Cristin Goetz, who donated $70,000 in seed money to open the clinic and a second one planned for the San Fernando Valley, is not reassured.

“We can no longer support AFI’s participation in this clinic. I would never be able to support AFI again,” she said.

The controversy comes amid a city campaign to encourage pet owners to neuter their animals to counteract a pet overpopulation crisis that forces officials to euthanize 68% of the 80,000 animals impounded in Los Angeles each year, Prang said.

It was Daugherty, then a clinic volunteer, who persuaded Frierson, a computer systems analyst, to bring his German shepherd there in February.

According to the city veterinarian’s report, Krzysztofik--who Stacey Herro says is in Poland--reportedly “became frustrated when he had to perform surgery on large female dogs.” It alleged that a large dog owned by the Lopez family reportedly died Jan. 10, a day after the vet “pulled all abdominal organs out of the abdominal cavity and placed them outside of the incision site and / or on the surgical table.”

Sometime during Jasmine’s operation, Krzysztofik could not find her uterus, according to clinic attendants.

“He was so frustrated he stuck his whole hand in the dog’s stomach without a glove, and just ran through her insides, taking all her insides out and twisting them around,” said Minnie Hueyopa, one of the attendants. “The dog died of trauma.”

(Stacey Herro said Hueyopa was fired from the clinic and should be “taken with a grain of salt.”)

Another attendant, Brittany Wathke, said that while the veterinarian manipulated Jasmine’s organs, she lurched up from the table, vomited undigested food, and inhaled vomit.

“I said shouldn’t this dog go to emergency?” Wathke said. “I thought the dog was going to die. Krzysztofik just said, ‘The dog will be fine.’ ”

Stacey Herro said she was concerned.

“Of course, everyone was,” she said. “We were all concerned after the dog threw up. I don’t know if he took the intestines out. It’s a call for the doctor whether you take the dog for emergency care or not. I guess Dr. Tom felt it was not necessary to do so.”

Frierson said that when he picked up Jasmine, Herro told him “there was a problem, but everything was going to be OK.” Krzysztofik told him Jasmine swallowed some vomit and gave him antibiotics to prevent a lung infection, but said Jasmine did not need to see another veterinarian, Frierson said.

“When Frierson was there, the vet said the dog could go home,” Wathke said.

Herro said: “Dr. Tom felt the dog was going to be fine.”

The next day, Frierson said, he called Krzysztofik several times and told him Jasmine looked seriously ill, and the veterinarian reassured him, he said. Frierson headed for an emergency hospital anyway, and Jasmine died on the way, he said. He rushed back to the clinic to confront Herro and Krzysztofik.

“She said, ‘We can get you another dog.’ He was stone-faced,” he said. “They tried to put the blame on me. They said, ‘You brought the dog in with a full stomach.’ ”

Herro said somebody fed the dog, because “it threw up on the operating table in volume like I’ve never seen before. It’s very dangerous to feed the dog before surgery.”

Frierson said he followed instructions not to feed Jasmine the night before the operation.

“I don’t know what they did to her on that operating table,” he said. “I would have been able to accept it if she had died in surgery, but she lived another day and a half in pain. I told him, ‘All you had to do was tell me to take her to the hospital.’ ”

Wathke said she confronted Herro.

“I said why didn’t [Jasmine] go to emergency? She said ‘We can’t really pay for that,’ ” Wathke said. “But the owner should have known, so he had the option.”

Herro denied this and said animals would have been sent for emergency care if their condition was deemed sufficiently serious, but at Lacy Street that never happened.

Public records show Krzysztofik was cited twice in the early 1990s by the state’s Board of Examiners in Veterinary Medicine. In one case, he allegedly falsified a medical report with fraudulent intent; in another, he failed to do laboratory tests to promptly diagnose the illness of a dog that died a few days later in the care of another veterinarian.

Richard Herro called Krzysztofik an “excellent surgeon . . . who handles things badly from a PR standpoint.

“We need someone a little better with the public, which we now have,” he said.

Times researcher Julia Franco contributed to this story.