Court absolves Nor-Seg Security Sompany of liability in shooting of woman at Florida hospital
Coral Gables FL Sept 24th 2021
Like many, when Margery Glickman thought of security guards, she associated their presence with safety and a certain peace of mind. One that came with knowing that if she were ever in imminent danger and a security guard were nearby, they would surely rush to her aid.
It never occurred to her that a guard might not be required to protect her. But then came the morning of Jan. 4, 2016, when she nearly bled out in front of an empty security guard’s desk at a South Florida hospital.
The guard had been there moments earlier, but had disappeared when she needed help, she said. The traumatic incident began a years-long journey of slow recovery, chronic pain, and a shocking discovery that would change everything: She learned that a contract between a security company and a hospital could absolve a guard of any legal obligation to protect anyone who wasn’t employed by the hospital.
“I don’t know anybody who goes into a place and sees a security guard and asks them, according to your contract, are you legally obliged to protect me?” Glickman added. “No one would ever think to ask that. It just doesn’t cross your mind.”
The night before, Glickman had received a call from Theobaldo Tamés — or Theo, as she knew him — the boyfriend of her longtime best friend Lillian (Lillie) Dickmon. Tamés, 87, had asked Glickman to meet him at the hospital in the morning. He wanted to talk, he told her. She had no idea that Lillie had passed away the previous night.
For the past several months, Margery’s friend had been in a diabetic coma at Kindred Hospital, located at 5190 SW Eighth St. in Coral Gables. Glickman visited her often, usually twice a week, and she would occasionally cross paths with Tamés. They would exchange pleasantries, but otherwise Tamés kept to himself. She didn’t know much about him. Only that he was originally from Cuba, she said, and had never raised his voice at her or been aggressive in any way.
The lengthy police report resulting from the shooting obliquely references an ongoing guardianship procedure, initiated by the Glickmans, in regard to the oversight of Dickmon’s financial affairs. But Margery Glickman told the Herald that the procedure was a petition for Dickmon’s nieces to be named guardians of Dickmon’s finances, something that she says Tamés had no objection to when the judge asked him in the courtroom.
She doesn’t think it would be enough to drive Tamés to kill her, she added. “No one knows why Theo tried to kill me. There’s a possibility that he went crazy when she died,” she said. “He was a quiet man with very little to say.”
Glickman, then 69, arrived at the hospital parking lot at around 9:30 am. The sky was thick with storm clouds, and the humidity clung to her clothes and hair as she hurried inside, in a rush to escape the imminent downpour. The same guard who always greeted her was in the lobby, seated at the front desk. Tamés was sitting in the lobby’s waiting area. He motioned for her to come over.
He was a small, unassuming man — shorter than she was — with thinning, salt-and-pepper hair, thick round glasses and bushy eyebrows.
“Margery, sit here,” he told her, motioning to the seat in front of him when she tried to sit next to him. Confused, she obliged.
That’s when she saw Tamés’ hand reach into a briefcase leaning against his chair. When he pulled it out, he was holding a gun. She heard the gunshot before she felt the bullet enter her stomach.
Things happened slowly then, but also all at once. Tamés had shot Glickman in the abdomen. It took her a moment to realize that the high-pitched screaming she heard was her own. A second shot rang directly over her head and knocked Glickman out of her trance. She got up to run. “I ran a few steps, and unfortunately, I fell down,” she said. “And he came after me.”
She had fallen directly in front of the guard’s desk. Any second now he would surely intervene, and she would be saved. But when she looked up, her blood ran cold. The guard who had been there just moments earlier — the same guard whom she saw regularly during her visits — was gone.
Tamés stood over her, aimed, and shot her again, this time in the face. “I put my hand up to grab my face and he shot me again in my arm,” Glickman said. “Then he looked at me, opened his mouth and shot himself.”
The rest Glickman remembers only in flashes. The blood pooling around her on the lobby floor. Holding her hand to her face, pleading for help. A heavyset man pressing down hard on her stomach. A police officer standing over her, checking her vitals. Someone saying “lift her all at once” as the world faded to black. Waking up again in an ambulance, a paramedic telling her they were headed to Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital. Relief. And searing pain. Then darkness.
Florida law has a lot to say about what security guards can and cannot do. They can be armed. They cannot display a Florida seal. They must carry a company ID at all times, in addition to their state ID. They can have amber lights on their vehicle. They can exercise detention powers if they work at a critical infrastructure facility. If they are armed, they must have a certain amount of training.
What does Florida law not cover? Whether security guards in hospitals are required to protect patients or visitors if a company contract specifies otherwise. In this case they weren’t, as it turns out.
Glickman wouldn’t wake up again for nearly a month. She was in a medically induced coma at Jackson for the next three weeks. The second bullet completely shattered the right side of her jaw so that the surgeon had to use titanium plates to hold her face together. But miraculously, she survived. Still, she couldn’t fathom how she could have been shot so many times with a guard in the same room just moments before. How Tamés, a man who was almost 90, had time to walk over to her, aim, and shoot her twice more before taking his own life.
Glickman and her husband Fred sued the hospital and the security company it contracted with, Nor-Seg Security Services, Inc., and discovered during the deposition of the security guard by Glickman’s lawyer, Andrew Yaffa, that the guard had left the lobby when the shooting began. The guard, who was unarmed per Kindred’s contract with Nor-Seg, “left the lobby through the front door,” Yaffa told the Herald. He made no efforts to stop the shooter.
That’s when the couple learned that Kindred’s contract with its security company limited guards to protecting only the hospital and its employees. Nor-Seg was therefore not liable. The Glickmans appealed. But in early January of this year, the Florida appeals court doubled down, ruling that Nor-Seg Security Services Inc. “owed no duty to the Glickmans.” As for the hospital, the Glickmans ended up settling with Kindred for an undisclosed amount.
The Glickmans weren’t just disappointed in the outcome of their suit against Nor-Seg, they felt the public was being betrayed with a false sense of security.
“That’s why I had to speak up,” said Margery Glickman. “I keep seeing the news about increased shootings, and people deserve to know that they can’t just assume security guards will protect them.”
A half-dozen hospital security experts told the Herald that such a provision is exceedingly rare. Every security team that they know of, they said, has policies and procedures that deal with patients, including how security should assist with disruptive or combative patients, patient belongings, patient escorts, and so on.
“I don’t believe that in my days running hospitals I ever recall being involved with a security company that was only going to protect staff and not visitors or patients,” Salvatore Barbera, the associate director of the health services administration program at Florida Atlantic University, told the Herald. “It’s definitely not an industry standard.”
Board certified hospital security consultant Michael D’Angelo agreed with Barbera’s assessment. “It’s very unique and unsettling language,” said D’Angelo. “As a security professional and a consumer of healthcare services, this terrifies me.”
Nor-Seg Security Services, Inc. was established in July 2003 by Ambakum and Herminia Nina Hapokian — respectively president and vice president of the business — according to records from the Florida Department of State’s Division of Corporations. Public records list the business as operating out of a house in Davie, Florida.
While Nor-Seg describes itself in court documents as a “corporation organized and existing under the laws of the state of Florida,” the logo that the company uses in its contract with Kindred perfectly matches that of a security company run out of Mexico by the same name. The website for the Mexican Nor-Seg states that the company does business internationally, including in the United States, and has been in business since September 2000. However, the website also specifically states that all Nor-Seg operations are conducted exclusively in adherence to “Mexican labor laws and established industry norms.”
Neither company responded to multiple emailed requests for comment, including questions regarding whether the Floridian Nor-Seg was a subsidiary of the Mexican Nor-Seg, or whether they were simply operating out of Florida using their name and logo.
A few months after the shooting, in June 2016, records show a change in the Florida Nor-Seg. It’s most recent address is in Miami. But the company has all but vanished off the internet. The phone number listed on official company records is out of service, and links to the company’s old website don’t work.
The clause that excluded Nor-Seg from protecting visitors and patients was not only unusual, but it also presented serious liability issues for the hospital, said the experts consulted by the Herald. None could fathom why Kindred would take such a risk, unless there was a significant cost-incentive that outweighed possible damages from future lawsuits, they said.
“When you see these mom-and-pop guard companies being utilized, especially in something as significant as the healthcare setting, it usually comes down to cost,” said D’Angelo. “The cost is significantly less than if you hire an Allied Universal or Securitas or one of the larger, more established security companies. The bottom line is you’re going to save money.”
This is because hospitals that contract with larger security companies can expect guards to arrive at their hospitals with at least basic training in medical protocols — something that smaller security services generally don’t have the resources to do, experts told the Herald. Such training is crucial for hospital settings, they said, because security officers who work in healthcare are expected to adhere to industry guidelines at all times, such as applicable requirements of HIPAA, which stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
Kindred hospital in Coral Gables is a for-profit, long-term acute care hospital. It is a subsidiary of for-profit parent company Kindred Healthcare Inc., the nation’s largest provider of post-acute care. Upon reviewing a copy of the contract Nor-Seg signed with Kindred Coral Gables, experts confirmed to the Herald that the rate Nor-Seg charged the hospital was far less than Kindred would have had to pay to hire guards from a larger security provider.
“It’s unfortunate, but when it comes to security costs in for-profit healthcare — particularly in long-term healthcare facilities where profit margins are incredibly thin — they are going to hire the absolute cheapest option that they can just to check a box,” said Bryan Warren, former president of the board of directors at the International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety (IAHSS). “And that tends to be really small, under-trained security companies.”
In response to a request for comment, a Kindred spokesperson reached out to the Herald via email. “This was a sad and unfortunate situation,” the email read. “We take patient and visitor safety very seriously and we are pleased that we were able to resolve this matter so that each party can put this matter behind them.”
The company did not respond to a question about whether Nor-Seg is still its security provider.
In Florida, the private security industry is licensed, regulated and subject to inspection by the Division of Licensing within the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS). But while the healthcare industry is one of the most regulated industries in the country and security guards are expected to abide by these regulations while in a hospital setting, “there is no specific class of license for security agencies contracting with the healthcare industry,” the communications office of Commissioner Nikki Fried told the Herald. This, experts told the Herald, is simply not enough.
“You can’t just take the same guard that is your night watchman for a parking lot somewhere and the next day, poof, he’s a healthcare security guard,” D’Angelo told the Herald. “That would be insane. He needs to have some very industry-specific training.”
“If a contract guard company is going to provide services in a healthcare environment, they should at a minimum be certified through the International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety progressive certification program,” Warren told the Herald. “This provides education on not only basic security functions but also the specific issues that healthcare facilities must contend with.”
However, the same experts cautioned that requiring additional licensing for security companies that plan to contract with hospitals would be difficult to impose, as well as unnecessarily burdensome for the industry.
“Hospitals are under constant pressure to maintain costs to ensure financial viability,” said Salvador Barbera from FAU. “If you raise the security licensing standard for all hospitals, the cost and financial burden could be unjustified in a large number of facilities and would contribute unnecessarily to increasing the cost of healthcare.”
Instead of additional licensing, both Barbera and D’Angelo emphasized that hospitals themselves should be required to have mandatory specialized healthcare security training for all new security staff before they start work.
Glickman, too, wants higher standards for security companies that operate in hospitals. Most of all, she wants hospitals that have contracts similar to Kindred’s to be required to publicly disclose to all who enter the building that their security team is not contracted to protect patients and visitors.
If there was a sign like that at Kindred, added Margery, it’s very possible that she never would have had to lose years of her life to a painful recovery and an arduous legal battle that only just got resolved earlier this year.
“The state regulates security companies and this needs to be one of the regulations,” Glickman told the Herald. “Businesses are more than happy to use the presence of security guards to increase traffic because it makes people feel safe, but in cases like Kindred, what the public is being presented with is a false sense of security. And people deserve to know the truth.”
