A suburban Chicago family won a $750,000 settlement Tuesday from the Peace Corps after their daughter died in 2018 of undiagnosed malaria while serving in East Africa.
Bernice Heiderman, 24, of Inverness, was volunteering in the island nation of Comoros, when 18 months into her tour she sought medical attention for what turned out to be classic symptoms of malaria — signs that a local Peace Corps doctor and the agency’s director of medical programs in Washington, D.C., apparently missed.
Heiderman’s mother, Julie, said the settlement “gives us the sense that the Peace Corps is taking some responsibility. That’s what we’ve wanted all along — that the Peace Corps thinks twice before it treats other families like this.”
The lawsuit, which took a complicated path from federal court to an administrative claim, said her preventable death was compounded by a bungled response from the agency that included delaying the repatriation of her remains, which arrived four days after her funeral.
It also said Peace Corps representatives suggested it was “her fault” and implied she should have asked to be tested for malaria.
It’s exceedingly hard to successfully sue the U.S. government. The family’s lawyer, Adam Dinnell, said in a statement he could find no record of any similar monetary settlement by the Peace Corps since its founding in the 1960s.
Joining the Peace Corps was a dream since high school for Heiderman. The 2016 University of Illinois Chicago graduate taught English to junior high students in the capital city of Moroni — teaching the kids to sing “Go! Cubs! Go!” in honor of her beloved World Series winning team.
She became ill around New Year’s Eve in 2017 with “headaches, dizziness, fevers and vomiting.” On Jan. 2, 2018, she visited the Peace Corps’ local doctor who said she had the flu and gave her aspirin and an antacid, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in 2020.
The doctor didn’t perform a rapid blood test for the mosquito-borne infection malaria, even though it’s common there, the suit said.
As her condition worsened to include numb limbs, diarrhea, chills, sweats, vomiting, headaches and dizziness, the doctor moved her to a local hotel room instead of to a hospital. His assistant administered IV infusions for dehydration. Within a week, she deteriorated further, finally collapsing and dying alone in a bathroom.
Later, the Peace Corps’ inspector general issued a report noting that malaria test kits and treatments were readily available and if they’d been used, Heiderman “could have made a rapid, full recovery.”
It also noted Heiderman had stopped taking antimalarial pills — a violation of Peace Corps rules — but the lawsuit alleged Peace Corps medical personnel had told her and other volunteers, incorrectly, “that malaria had been eradicated from Comoros.”
“Throughout this entire heartbreaking fiasco, the Peace Corps maintained it did nothing wrong and raised every legal defense it could to thwart our clients’ search for justice,” said Dinnell, partner at Schiffer Hicks Johnson. “Holding the agency accountable for its tragic missteps in this case can hopefully prevent situations like this from happening again.’’
The Peace Corps did not admit fault. It said in a statement it “continues to mourn the tragic loss of Volunteer Bernice Heiderman.”
“The health and safety of our Volunteers is of the utmost importance to our agency, and we remain committed to ensuring that every Volunteer has a safe and successful experience,” the agency said.
Julie Heiderman said she and her husband, Bill, and their daughter, Grace, and son, Billy, miss Bernice every day.
“The biggest thing for me is that there were just so many what ifs,” Julie Heiderman said. “I would love to know what direction Bernice would have been going right now.”
She recalls a Target run in the days before her daughter left, as Bernice lugged toothpaste, shampoo and other toiletries to the cash register. The cashier asked if she was entering the military, and she replied no, she was in the Peace Corps.
“Bernice was like, ‘It is kind of like a branch of the military, but we don’t deal with guns,’” her mom said. “That was her attitude — it was service to the country. I’m so proud that she felt that and followed through and did her part.
“And she loved it there. She really loved the people.”
Her aunt, Marilyn Olimpio, said her niece was broad-minded and loved to travel but also was family-focused and grounded.
“She was a very funny young woman with sort of an irreverent sense of humor” who also had a sense of “just wanting to be a part of the world, but also being very much a part of Chicago,” Olimpio said.
“I think she would have done really good things, whether on a quote-unquote ‘big scale’ or on a smaller scale. It would have been something extraordinary, there’s no doubt about it.”
