A New Mexico man has filed a medical malpractice lawsuit alleging that a series of critical failures by his doctors and hospital staff led to a missed cancer diagnosis, irreversible harm and a drastically shortened life expectancy.
Joey Gonzalez, a 54-year-old law enforcement instructor from Eddy County, is suing Roswell Hospital Corporation, doing business as Eastern New Mexico Medical Center (ENMMC), along with two of its physicians: Gastroenterologist Dr. Daniel Ridout III and pathologist Dr. George Atkinson.
According to the complaint, Gonzalez sought medical care in July 2022 for persistent difficulty swallowing solid food. He was referred to Ridout at ENMMC, who performed an endoscopic procedure and collected biopsy samples.
Atkinson reportedly noted abnormal findings and sent the tissue to the Cleveland Clinic, a nationally respected pathology center, for further analysis. The clinic reported back on July 27, 2022, confirming a diagnosis of early-stage esophageal cancer.
This diagnosis, if acted upon promptly, would have allowed Gonzalez to undergo curative surgery. But the lawsuit alleges that no one at ENMMC bothered to inform Gonzalez about his cancer.
“The danger of not informing the patient that they have a critical diagnosis is medicine 101,” says Adrian O. Vega, a partner with Buckingham & Vega, the team representing Gonzalez in the lawsuit. “These are basics that hospitals and their physicians need to be doing every single time.”
According to the suit, Atkinson failed to tell Ridout the findings. Meanwhile, Ridout allegedly told Gonzalez that the biopsy was benign and showed no evidence of cancer, despite having never received the Cleveland Clinic’s results.
Gonzalez continued to worsen over the following months. It wasn’t until January 2023—six months after the initial diagnosis—that another physician diagnosed the cancer during another evaluation. By that time, Gonzalez’s condition had deteriorated to the point that immediate surgery was impossible without first going through intensive chemotherapy and radiation.
In June 2023, the surgery was finally performed—nearly a year after the original diagnosis. But by then, the cancer had already spread to other parts of his body. Gonzalez is now undergoing ongoing treatment, but doctors say his prognosis is poor.
The lawsuit claims that ENMMC lacked policies requiring doctors to communicate urgent cancer diagnoses, even though national medical guidelines call for it.
“The goal is always to bring these system failures to the hospital’s attention and to the community’s attention,” says Vega.
Gonzalez is seeking compensatory damages for pain and suffering, loss of income, medical expenses, and loss of life expectancy. He is also requesting punitive damages, arguing that the conduct of the defendants was reckless and showed disregard for patient safety.
The hospital where the incident occurred is owned and operated by Community Health Systems (CHS), one of the largest for-profit hospital operators in the country. CHS is a publicly traded company based in Tennessee that owns and leases more than 70 hospitals across the U.S.
Vega says the systemic failure of this incident is tied to broader issues of hospital oversight in the state.
“We have these massive for-profit corporations from out of state that come into New Mexico, and they treat our patients like revenue streams,” says Vega. “The quality of care and the patient safety measures diminish, but the hospital’s profits go up.”
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