A resident of Hawaii sued the state: because of a fake rocket alarm, his heart stopped

The man and his girlfriend sued the state of Hawaii, saying that a fake report about a rocket attack on an island state caused a heart attack on the plaintiff.

Twitter screenshot

Defendants in the lawsuit of James Shawn Shields and his girlfriend, Brenda Raichel, appear as a state, as well as Vern Miyagi, the former head of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, writes CNN.

In the suit, the couple claims that on January 13 they were driving to the beach when they received a text message with warnings that a missile was being sent to Hawaii, and that they urgently need to find shelter.

“Both plaintiffs believed that this message was real, and therefore they were very scared and thought that they would soon die. They realized there was nothing they could do to protect themselves from the threat and decided that if they had to die, it would be better if it happened while they were together on the beach,” the lawsuit states.

Then Rachel received a call from her son, who serves in the National Guard of Hawaii. He told her that the threat was real, which further heightened the couple’s fear.

A few minutes later they arrived at the beach and began to call their loved ones, saying goodbye to them. Immediately after Shields called his son and daughter, who live on the continents of the United States, the man began to feel a "heavy and painful burning sensation" in his chest.

He went to the hospital where he experienced cardiac arrest. The doctors managed to reanimate the man, after which Shields underwent emergency surgery. Several tests thereafter confirmed that a heart attack caused serious damage to a man’s heart.

A Californian doctor blamed the heart emergency for a false attack alert.

“In my opinion, the warning of an impending missile attack on the Hawaiian Islands was a significant factor in causing heart attack and cardiac arrest. Mr. Shields had no history of heart disease. Within 15 minutes of receiving information about the impending missile attack, Mr. Shields developed symptoms of acute myocardial dysfunction. He suffered cardiac arrest shortly thereafter,” said John S. McGregor, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at San Francisco Medical School whose findings are cited in the lawsuit.

By the time Shields and Rachel reached the hospital, the state had already sent a second message to the phones of Hawaii residents with information that the alarm was false, this happened 38 minutes after the initial warning. But the couple did not see these messages, because they were too busy due to Shields heart attack.

Fake missile alarm in January caused a massive panic in Hawaiibecause at that time there was an extremely heated atmosphere between the USA and North Korea. The fake alert was mistakenly sent by a Hawaiian Emergency Management Agency employee during a training session, which he took as a real situation.

An internal investigation revealed that “insufficient control of management, poor design of computer software and human factors contributed” to sending a false warning and delaying sending a second message with information about a fake threat. Following the investigation, the director of the department Miyagi resigned.

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