St. Luke's Hospital

Instead of going out to dinner with his girlfriend as planned, Scott Massidda, SEAS ’11, spent Valentine’s Day at St. Luke’s Hospital, allegedly after University administrators deemed him dangerous. Since the event, Massidda—who believes school officials acted in an exaggerated reaction to the shootings at Northern Illinois University earlier that day—has been through a series of meetings pressing administrators to foot his hospital bill, admit wrongdoing, and release records documenting his psychological evaluation.

Ever since the closing of St. Vincent’s Midtown hospital, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center has been feeling the crunch associated with more patients. The volume of traffic at St. Luke’s emergency room has increased almost twofold, according to Dr. Dan Weiner, chairman of Emergency Medicine at the hospital. Because of this influx, a recent $15 million allocation devoted to the expansion of the hospital emergency room at the Roosevelt campus was, according to Weiner, both necessary and inevitable.