The adult children of a Florida nurse who had nearly every bone in her face broken in an on-the-job assault say their mother’s life has been changed forever, as she faces a long road getting back to being the person she was before the attack.
Leelamma Lal, 67, dreamt of becoming a nurse since she was child. She pushed through almost eight years of school and clinical training to achieve that goal while raising three children, her daughter, Cindy Joseph, told HuffPost in an interview. Her hard work paid off, and Lal spent nearly 20 years in health care, becoming one of the oldest nurses on her floor at Palms West Hospital in Palm Beach, Florida.
Lal’s life took a drastic turn on Feb. 18, when she was attacked in the hospital’s third floor cardiac telemetry unit, allegedly by patient Stephen Scantlebury, 33.
Lal survived the incident and was taken to a separate hospital to have her injuries treated. She is likely to lose the use of both her eyes after having nearly every bone in her face broken, deputies from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office wrote in an affidavit within a criminal complaint obtained by HuffPost.
Lal’s daughter recalled the heartbreak she felt seeing her mother in the hospital shortly after the attack. Lal was still bleeding by the time her daughter arrived at the hospital. She was hooked up to a nasogastric tube and both her eyes were bruised.
“When I saw her, it was horrible,” Joseph told HuffPost, adding that her mother was in a coma at the time and her face was “unrecognizable.”
“I was so mad that this happened to her,” the daughter said. “She spent her entire life wanting to be a nurse.”
She added, “She loved being a nurse, loved caring for patients, and the fact that this would happen to her where she should be safe was — I just couldn’t believe it was real.”
Lal’s children told HuffPost they are still trying to piece together what exactly happened to their mother that day. Witnesses told authorities that the patient had been acting paranoid for days before he was admitted to Palms West under Florida’s Baker Act for a mental health evaluation, according to the complaint.
However, Palms West Hospital is not a Baker Act receiving facility, the hospital’s parent company HCA confirmed with HuffPost last week, noting that it could not talk about specific cases due to patient privacy laws.
Multiple witnesses told authorities that the patient jumped onto Lal when she entered his room, prompting another witness to run out to call security for help, according to the complaint. The man allegedly did not stop assaulting Lal until a witness yelled at him.
“I couldn’t imagine what she was going through at the time, probably the confusion she felt, wondering what she did wrong, what was happening,” Joseph said.
The patient was allegedly able to flee the hospital and managed to escape into traffic, where he was taken into custody by the sheriff’s department. He was charged with second-degree attempted murder and is facing a hate crime enhancement after authorities say he made comments about Lal’s ethnicity.
Lal’s assault has brought attention to the increased violence health care workers face in the United States. A 2024 survey by nurse’s union National Nurses United found that eight in 10 nurses had experienced at least one type of workplace violence within the past year.
More than a week after the incident, Lal’s children remain devastated and worried about their mother’s well-being. She has become more agitated, one of her eyes is still closed shut and she’s unable to hold a pen.
“She can’t drive, she can’t do certain things. It’s going to really impact her and my family a lot, and it’s really unfortunate, because I feel like this could have been prevented,” Joseph said.
Now, the daughter worries about the lasting psychological impact this could have on her mother, and fears the risk of dementia or Alzheimer’s due to her age.
“I don’t think she’s going to be the same person she was before this happened,” Joseph said.