Jurors find hospital guilty of all charges in $220 million ‘Take Care of Maya’ case

Maya Kowalski sobbed heavily as a jury decided she had won her $220 million medical malpractice case on Thursday.

A Florida jury found Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital guilty of all charges in the case, which was featured in the Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya.”

Now, 17, Maya Kowalski gripped a cross and was overcome with emotion as the stunning verdict was announced in a tense St. Petersburg courtroom.

Kowalski’s mother had admitted the then10-year-old girl to the facility in 2015, telling doctors she was suffering from a chronic pain condition that required risky ketamine treatments.

Skeptical about Beata Kowalski’s demands — and the severity of Kowalski’s condition — staffers contacted Florida child welfare authorities.

Maya was soon removed from her parents’ care and made an involuntary medical ward of the state.

After being barred from seeing Kowalski for 85 days and facing child abuse allegations, Beata Kowalski took her own life in the garage of the family’s home.

Contending that the hospital wrongfully committed Maya and cruelly separated her from her mother, the Kowalski family sued the facility for $220 million.

Kowalski and her brother exploded into heaving sobs midway through the reading of the verdict, as the clerk referred to Beata’s Kowalski’s suicide and the hospital’s complicity in her death.

Maya testified at trial she still suffered from the debilitating effects of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, a neurological condition.

She told jurors hospitals staffers were dismissive of her condition and believed her mother was suffering from Munchausen by Proxy syndrome, where caregivers contrive or exaggerate a child’s ailments for attention.

Hospital attorneys argued that staffers took drastic measures because they felt Kowalski’s mother was endangering her with the ketamine treatments, which she had originally begun in Mexico.

In a draft of a 2015 blog post Beata had composed in her daughter’s voice, she had acknowledged the risks, writing how her previous induced ketamine coma in the Mexican clinic could potentially result in “total body failure/death.”

Still writing from Maya’s perspective, she wrote elsewhere that “if I was a horse I would be comatose or dead already” as a result of the severity of the treatments.

But Kowalski’s lawyers cast hospital staff as guilty of being unfeeling and overreach in separating the young girl from her mother, a measure that ultimately left her without one.

Kowalski cried repeatedly on the stand while recalling her mother’s care, telling jurors she felt lonely and abandoned while a ward of the state.

The jury sided with the teen in totality, finding the renowned hospital guilty of false imprisonment, malpractice and infliction of emotional distress.

The facility is now facing tens of millions of dollars in penalties, although they are expected to appeal the verdict.