‘I’m stressed’: Mom hopes to bring son in coma home soon as Dominican Republic hospital bill reaches $78K

Chase Delorme-Rowan is shown in a handout photo taken in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Cindy Rowan

EDMONTON — An Edmonton woman says she’s hoping her teenage son wakes up from an induced coma soon so she can bring him home after a bar fight in the Dominican Republic left him with a traumatic brain injury.

“I’m stressed. I cry all the time,” Cindy Rowan said in an interview.

“There’s no timeline with a brain injury.

“My hospital bill is already at $78,000.”

Rowan says on Jan. 14, a witness told police her son, 18-year-old Chase Delorme-Rowan, was lifted in the air by the collar of his shirt and slammed head first onto a tile floor at a Punta Cana resort bar.

A fellow Canadian has been charged in the case.

Rowan said the attack cracked her son’s skull from top to bottom and a blood clot the size of a grapefruit displaced his brain.

“It was squishing his brain so they had to open his skull and they had to remove that,” Rowan said from a hotel in Punta Cana close to the hospital where her son is recovering on the eastern shore of the Caribbean island.

His skull was left open for five days after the clot’s removal so his swollen brain had room to recover and stop bleeding.

“Then they finally sewed him up,” she said.

Now, she said she and her mother are waiting for the doctor’s OK to bring the teen back to Edmonton. She said he might need a nurse and a doctor to accompany them. She said she’s also in touch with doctors in Edmonton who are guiding her on how to proceed.

Rowan said, “Every day I’m hoping, when I walk into (his) room, that he’s sitting up in bed,” but acknowledged it’s distressing to contemplate what the brain injury has done to him.

She said her family arrived for a vacation for Delorme-Rowan’s 18th birthday on Jan. 9 at the Royalton Splash Punta Cana.

On Jan. 13, she said Delorme-Rowan and his two older brothers asked her if they could go to a bar at the other end of the resort.

Then just after midnight, she said she got a call from her second oldest son, who told her that Delorme-Rowan had passed out.

Rowan said she assumed he drank too much, told her kids to go back to their resort room, and went back to bed with her husband.

The phone rang again.

“My son is now in hysterics, screaming and crying, and he’s like, ‘Mom, the ambulance is coming. I don’t know what’s wrong with Chase,’” she said. “I could hear people in the background screaming and yelling.”

She ran over to the bar with her husband to find her son in the middle of a large crowd, with her two other boys standing nearby in shock. Someone was holding Delorme-Rowan’s head. The teen was having seizures, with bloody foam coming out of his mouth.

At the hospital, she said doctors waited until sunrise to treat her son because they were waiting for the medical insurance to process.

The police report sent to Rowan and shared with The Canadian Press says Delorme-Rowan was hit so hard he fell to the floor on his head. He underwent a two-hour surgery.

She said resort workers eventually tracked down the accused. “The hotel put out pictures of him everywhere and it was kind of like a man hunt around here,” she said.

Rowan added that she met the accused at the resort two days before the assault, and said he was cordial.

“There’s lots of Canadians here. We say hi to each other and you talk to them,” she said.

The police report lists the accused as Kyle Stephen Denny.

Police in the Dominican Republic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rowan said he has been charged with assault causing bodily harm and is out on bail.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 22, 2025.

Fakiha Baig, The Canadian Press