The hospital that treated astronaut Neil Armstrong immediately before his 2012 death paid out $6 million to his family to settle a wrongful death suit, according to the New York Times.
What are the details?
Armstrong died at age 82 in 2012 from complications following heart surgery at Mercy Health-Fairfield Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. He had begun to bleed internally during bypass surgery that doctors decided was necessary after conducting tests.
Documents obtained by the New York Times revealed a bitter feud between his family and the hospital. In addition to 93 pages of private documents that were mailed to the paper by an anonymous source, these events seem to be confirmed by publicly available documents on the website of the Hamilton County Probate Court.
While the hospital never admitted any wrongdoing, it did ultimately pay the family $6 million in 2014. This was presumably meant to prevent the bad publicity of even being accused of killing the first man on the moon.
Out of this $6 million settlement, $5.2 went to Armstrong's sons, Mark and Rick Armstrong, $500,000 was split between his siblings Dean A. Armstrong and June L. Hoffman, and $144,000 was divided equally between his six grandchildren.
Notably, Armstrong's widow refused to take part in the settlement, although she did agree to sign off on it in her role as her husband's executor.
"I had no choice — it was either that or lose my job as executor," she told a reporter, according to the New York Times account.
The hospital seemed to confirm that this happened
Nanette Bentley, a spokeswoman for the Bon Secours Mercy Health hospital group, told The Cincinnati Enquirer, that the "public nature of these details is very disappointing — both for our ministry and the patient's family who had wished to keep this legal matter private."
The news of the settlement comes only days after the 50th anniversary of Armstrong's historic walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.
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