Chicago Area Local News

CHICAGO (CBS) ― Teachers, students and parents are mourning the loss of a Chicago elementary school principal who died after undergoing a root canal at an East Lakeview neighborhood dental office.

Georgette Watson, 46, of Skokie, was pronounced dead at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center just after 11 a.m. Monday. Watson was principal of Brentano Math and Science Academy, at 2723 N. Fairfield Ave., in the Logan Square neighborhood.

Before dawn, the flag was lowered to half staff at the school. Black bunting was also placed outside. Some 600 students attend Brentano, and the entire community will miss a principal who cared deeply about them and their education.

"This is a tremendous shock to this school community. She was just a wonderful, wonderful person who cared, who supported the faculty and ensured that the needs of the students were being met here," Barbara Eason-Watkins, chief education officer for the Chicago Public Schools, said.

"We will miss her a lot, because she was so encouraging. She loved us a lot even if we were bad or good," student Arelis Ortiz said.

"She was a great lady – for the kids, for everybody. She just took care of everybody at the school. Those kids are all going to miss her very much," said school janitor Thomas Fontana. "She took care of me like I was her son. I'm the same age, but she just took care of us very well."

"She was aggressively after education for the kids, that's what she was," said another man affiliated with the school. "She was very persistent."

A well-liked educator who spent 25 years at Brentano as a teacher, then an assistant principal, and ultimately the person in charge, Watson passed away after a visit to the Feldman & Feldman dental practice, at 3423 N. Broadway.  The two doctors are brothers.

"It's sad to hear, especially in a dental procedure. I was just at the dentist a week ago, and it's scary, sad, it's sad for all the kids," Alva Brito, a mother of a student, said.

Watson appeared to go into cardiac arrest while sedated during root canal surgery Monday morning.

Root canals are safe, common procedures. Police say Watson was under sedation, and that is uncommon.

"The other specialists rarely ever use sedation," said Dr. Christopher Wenckus of the UIC College of Dentistry. "We've been trained to use local anesthetics."

She stopped breathing about 40 minutes into the surgery. Police said personnel in the office tried to revive her before paramedics arrived. She suffered an apparent heart attack, authorities said. An autopsy preformed Tuesday was inconclusive.

No one answered the door at the Broadway office Tuesday morning, and a representative at another office declined to comment.

But the dentists, Laurence W. and Joseph David Feldman, did release a statement.

The statement read: "Words alone cannot measure the grief and sadness we feel on the sudden loss of Georgette Watson. We, too, are overcome with emotion while recalling past visits where we experienced her wonderful ways and charm. We know how much her family, as well as the Brentano School family, meant to her, and her to them. We hope that they can embrace her loving ways, as we will, as they struggle to face the loss of someone who occupied such a big place in their hearts and lives."

The statement did not address the circumstances of Watson's death.

The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation put the doctors on probation last July for performing crown and bridge treatment on a patient allegedly below the standard of care and failing to maintain proper patient records. The probation is in effect until Sept. 30, 2009.

Both dentists have been disciplined for unspecified reasons in the past, the department said. State officials said the brothers have been complying with the terms of their probation. They also said during a random inspection of one of their offices recently, no problems were found.

Deaths in dental practices have been under scrutiny locally since September of last year, when Diamond Brownridge, 5, died four days after she was sedated at a Little Village neighborhood dental office so that she could have two cavities filled and caps could be placed on her front teeth.

The Brownridge family settled a $1 million lawsuit with Dr. Hicham Riba, the dentist involved in the case. The Department of Professional and Financial Regulation ruled that Riba's dentistry license should be suspended for 18 months. 

Patients can find information about dentists on the Web site of the Illinois division of Financial and Professional Regulation.

"They won't get the details of why the person is on probation but it may be in there that there's action against that person," Wenckus said.

If you'd like to check the state's records for your dentist, click here.

CBS 2's Dorothy Tucker, Joanie Lum and Kristyn Hartman, the Associated Press and the STNG Wire contributed to this report.

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