Luis Christopher Bustamante - Knoxville, TN

At the end of June last year I lost my mother to a traumatic head injury while on vacation with my family in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She fell off her bike and hit her head. My sister used to babysit for a lawyer in Tampa, and because we felt like response time for emergency personnel took an abnormally long time, she decided to reach out to him and see if he could look into it for us. He put us In contact with Luis Bustamante in Tennessee and all medical records and other records were sent over to him. After a month or two of him having the records he contacted my family and we had a conference call. He informed us that the private ambulance company that responded, had intubated my mother’s esophagus after 4 intubation attempts, and ventilated her stomach for 20 minutes until the helicopter crew got there and found that the intubation had been done incorrectly. Obviously this infuriated us and made us want to proceed with the investigation/lawsuit. Only one small thing.. before we could continue with the lawsuit he wanted my father to sign a contingency agreement that left him open to all costs associated with the investigation(Luis Bustamante’s time, doctors he had to talk to to review my moms records, etc.) with no limit to the amount that he would possibly have to pay back. Of course this was only in the fine print of the contract he wanted my dad to sign and was found when my dad brought it to his lawyer here in town. But an esophageal intubation, unnoticed for 20 minutes? That’s an open and shut case right? My dad was a little put off by this “contingency agreement” because this is uncommon for lawyers to do, per his lawyer here In town. Why would Luis Bustamante require a contingency agreement for a case like this? When he told us about these 4 Intubation attempts, it wasn’t a question, like, we think this might have happened, it was a fact. AMR made 4 intubation attempts until ultimately placing the breathing tube in her stomach and ventilating it for 20 minutes. We decided to request these records back so that we could decipher them for ourselves(since we hadn’t done so after the accident, which both lawyers knew.) I am a firefighter/paramedic so I reviewed the ambulance records, and the helicopter records. It didn’t take me more than 5 minutes to look over these records and see that not only did AMR’s documentation show that they never made an intubation attempt, their report summary stated that the helicopter crew came in and made the intubation. The helicopter crews report coincided with the ambulances. I sent an email stating these facts to Luis Bustamante and the he immediately dropped the case. The lawyer in Tampa that my sister knew had called us a couple of times after and stated that Luis was working off of a timeline discrepancy and that he believes he was not trying to take advantage of us. That’s not how we felt then, and that’s most definitely not how we feel now.