A Jackson Memorial Hospital trauma nurse who was caught on surveillance video being repeatedly punched by a patient in the emergency department is now accusing the hospital of retaliating against her for speaking publicly about the attack — a claim Jackson disputes.
The attack
Registered nurse Yanira Eguileor was injured on May 30 when she stepped in to protect a colleague who was being hit by a patient in the Miami hospital’s emergency department, according to her attorney. Surveillance footage that surfaced this week shows the patient, identified by police as 44-year-old Wenyou Rubin, repeatedly punching hospital staff. Eguileor sustained bruising and head trauma that required CT scans of her brain, neck, spine, and arms.
Rubin was arrested and charged with battery on an emergency medical care provider. Miami-Dade court records show he has other pending felony cases, including a prior charge of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer. The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office says he remains in custody awaiting transfer to a psychiatric facility. He has not been convicted, and the charges against him remain allegations at this stage.
The $5 million lawsuit — and a separate whistleblower complaint
Eguileor is seeking $5 million in damages in a civil lawsuit against Jackson Memorial Hospital and Miami-Dade County, arguing the hospital failed to post visible security in one of its busiest units and left staff exposed. Her attorney, Michael Pizzi, has also filed a separate whistleblower complaint alleging the hospital retaliated against her after she spoke publicly about the attack — specifically, Pizzi says she was transferred out of the trauma unit, ostracized by colleagues, called into human resources roughly half a dozen times, and at one point deleted from the hospital’s internal computer system.
Jackson Memorial disputes the retaliation claim and says it offered Eguileor support services after the May attack. The hospital has also alleged, separately, that it discovered Eguileor had accessed and acquired patients’ protected health information without authorization for personal gain — a claim that is the hospital’s own account of the employment dispute, not a finding made by any court, and one Eguileor’s side has not been shown to have admitted.
Neither case has been resolved
Both the $5 million civil suit and the whistleblower complaint are in their early stages, and neither Jackson Memorial nor Miami-Dade County has filed a formal response in court as of publication. A hospital spokesperson has publicly disputed the retaliation narrative but has not disputed that the attack itself happened or that Eguileor was injured. Pizzi has said he intends to pursue both matters — the security-failure claim tied to the assault itself, and the separate retaliation claim tied to what happened to Eguileor afterward — as distinct legal actions rather than folding them into one filing.
Workplace violence against nurses has become one of the most consistently documented safety problems in U.S. hospitals, and emergency departments are routinely flagged as the highest-risk setting. Cases like this one tend to resonate because the video removes any ambiguity about what happened in the moment — the dispute that follows is almost always about what happened to the nurse afterward, not during.
I’ve worked ER and psych units where the space between “we appreciate you” and “we’d rather you stopped talking about it” can close fast once a video goes viral and the hospital’s name is in the headline instead of just yours. Whether or not every detail of this dispute holds up, the pattern nurses recognize instantly is the timeline: hurt on the job, praised publicly, then quietly moved, questioned, and sidelined once the cameras turned elsewhere. If your facility doesn’t have visible security in the department where you’re most likely to get hit, that’s worth raising in writing — before you need the paper trail, not after.