DA Sues Burlingame Hotel for Carbon Monoxide Leak That Gave a Pilot Brain Damage

By Bay City News, image via Shutterstock

The San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office is suing a Burlingame hotel for alleged maintenance violations that led to a commercial airline pilot suffering permanent brain damage from carbon monoxide poisoning in 2012, prosecutors said.

The district attorney’s office filed the civil complaint against the owners and operators of the Embassy Suites Hotel at 150 Anza Blvd. on Monday. The complaint alleges that the hotel installed a boiler in a pool equipment room in 1998 without obtaining a permit from the city as a cost-saving measure.

Over the next 14 years, the hotel did not properly maintain the equipment and it became clogged, holes opened in ventilation pipes and the room’s configuration was changed, which prevented proper ventilation and caused a significant carbon monoxide leak, according to the complaint.

When pilot Robert McNamara checked into the room directly above the pool equipment room on Nov. 6, 2012, the room had dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, according to prosecutors. McNamara’s colleagues became worried when he went missing the following day. That evening, hotel staff entered his room and found him on his bed with blood and vomit coming from his nose and mouth, according to the complaint.

McNamara was unresponsive and had difficulty breathing. He was taken to a hospital, where doctors eventually determined he was suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning.

The hotel was evacuated, but no other guests required hospitalization. Dangerous levels of carbon monoxide were discovered in the pool equipment room, McNamara’s room, and elsewhere in the hotel, according to the complaint. McNamara spent the next three months in the hospital with severe brain damage requiring speech and physical therapy. He then spent three more months in an assisted living facility in Bakersfield relearning basic life skills, and continues struggling with irreversible brain damage to this day, according to the complaint.

The district attorney’s office is seeking to impose more then $3 million in penalties against the hotel’s management and owners for numerous alleged violations of the California Mechanical Code, according to the compliant. A suit McNamara and his wife filed against the hotel in 2013 is still pending in San Mateo County Superior Court.