Lawsuit challenges helicopter's weight rule for transporting trauma patients

From the Naples news:

One calamity after another led to the death of Diana Lopez, a 37-year-old business owner in Naples who cared for her disabled parents and helped raise a niece and nephew, her family contends in a recent lawsuit.

She was the victim of a tire blowout one January afternoon last year on Interstate 75 and was thrown from her Ford Expedition after the vehicle flipped near mile marker 63, just inside the Collier County line. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt.

The next disaster came when the Collier County Emergency Medical Services Medflight helicopter declined to fly her to the trauma unit at Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers because she exceeded the 300-pound weight limit per patient, according to the wrongful death lawsuit filed by her family against Collier County government in Collier Circuit Court in February.