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The chief of the emergency department of a Manhattan hospital committed suicide after spending days on the coronavirus battlefront, her family said Monday.
“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” Dr. Philip Breen told the New York Times about his medical daughter, Lorna Breen, who had been medical director of NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in the midst of the pandemic.
The father said his 49-year-old daughter, who died Sunday, had no history of mental illness. But he said the last time they spoke, she told him how excruciating it was to see contagion patients die, even some even before they could get them out of the ambulance.
“She was really in the trenches on the front line,” Philip Breen told the Times.
“Make sure she is praised as a heroine,” she added. “She is a victim as much as any other person who has died.”
Lorna Breen died in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had stayed with her family, the father said.
He said he had become ill with the virus while on the job at one point, but returned to work after about a week and a half of recovery. Still, the hospital sent her home again, and her family brought her to Virginia.
Two days before the doctor’s suicide, a city EMT who also worked on the front lines of the city’s battle with the virus killed himself.
Rookie paramedic John Mondello, 23, used a gun registered with his father, a retired NYPD cop, to kill himself along a river wall on Shore Boulevard in Astoria, Queens, on Friday, they said. Police sources at The Post at the time.
He graduated from the Fire Department’s EMS Academy in early February, then headed directly to EMS Station 18 at Claremont in The Bronx, which handles one of the highest volumes of 911 calls in the city.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s telephone number is 1-800-273-8255.
