A top emergency room doctor at a major Manhattan hospital, New York died by suicide Sunday, according to her father.
Dr. Lorna M. Breen, medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she was staying with family, her father said in an interview.
Charlottesville police, who received a call from the residence just before noon, confirmed the death was from “self-inflicted injuries.”
Her father, Dr. Philip C. Breen, said she had described devastating scenes of the toll the coronavirus took on patients.
“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” he said.
“She was in every sense of the word a hero, who gave her life for her friends and her city,” her father said.
Philip Breen said his daughter had contracted the coronavirus but had gone back to work after recuperating for about a week and a half. The hospital sent her home again, before her family intervened to bring her to Charlottesville, he said.
It was not clear why Lorna Breen would have taken her own life. She did not have a history of mental illness, her father said.
But he said that when he last spoke with her, she seemed detached, and he could tell something was wrong. She had described to him an onslaught of patients dying before they could even be taken out of ambulances.
