LifeStar Ambulance Service officials say they will continue to press their case in court after failing to convince a judge May 22 that the company shouldn’t be kicked out of Springfield and Sangamon County’s 911 emergency response system.
“We will continue to contest it until hell freezes over,” LifeStar owner Roger Campbell told Illinois Times on May 25.
The company’s legal right to respond to medical emergencies with its Springfield-based ambulances, emergency medical technicians and paramedics ended at 12:01 a.m. May 26 after Springfield Memorial Hospital permanently suspended LifeStar from the emergency medical services network it oversees.
LifeStar filed a civil lawsuit against Springfield Memorial on May 18 to reverse the suspension. Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge Ryan Cadagin on May 22 denied LifeStar’s request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to temporarily halt the suspension from taking effect while the case continues in court.
Local laws adopted by the Springfield City Council and Sangamon County Board prevent an ambulance provider from responding to calls to the local 911 system if they are not part of a hospital-administered EMS system.
As an alternative, LifeStar Chief Executive Officer John Wright said LifeStar asked that its Springfield site, at 404 N. Second St., be added to the EMS network overseen by HSHS St. John’s Hospital. But Wright said HSHS officials have told the company that the Catholic health system, which supervises ambulance providers in mostly rural parts of central Illinois, doesn’t have the capacity to add LifeStar.
Campbell said Springfield Memorial unfairly “targeted” LifeStar but wouldn’t provide details. He said the company has hired a private investigator and received several responses to its recent post on Facebook offering a $10,000 reward “for information leading to evidence regarding the unjust suspension and removal efforts” by Springfield Memorial.
LifeStar officials said the company is dispatched to an average of 827 calls throughout Sangamon County each month, almost all of them 911 calls, and those calls generate an average of $368,828 in monthly revenues for the company.
Campbell said Springfield Memorial’s suspension was too harsh and more severe than for other companies involving similar infractions.
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A hospital spokesperson said the hospital won’t comment on pending litigation. The hospital’s attorney, William Davis of Brown, Hay and Stephens, said in his successful motion to dismiss LifeStar’s request for a temporary reprieve that LifeStar “failed to state any legally recognized cause of action” and “failed to exhaust its administrative remedies.”
LifeStar officials said the suspension could lead to the layoff of 26 employees, and Campbell said a reduction from three to two ambulance providers in Springfield will lengthen response times, and, in doing so, threaten patients’ lives.
“The sad thing is nobody’s thought this through,” Campbell said. “I hope nobody dies, but it’s not going to be good. It’s going to be a mess.”
However, Springfield Fire Chief Nicholas Zummo said he is “cautiously optimistic” that the city’s other two ambulance providers, for-profit America Ambulance and nonprofit Medics First, will be able to pick up the slack.
According to Zummo, when there are three ambulance providers, city code requires that each one maintain at least two ambulance crews on the street during off-peak hours, for a total of six crews, and three crews during peak hours, for a total of nine crews.
If the number of providers drops to two, Zummo said, the ordinance requires each provider to put at least three crews on the street during non-peak hours, for a total of six, and five crews during peak hours, for a total of 10 crews.
Zummo said officials from America and Medics First told him they are “confident they won’t have a problem meeting those numbers.”
Centralia-based LifeStar was founded in 1973. It operates sites in Centralia, Jacksonville and Springfield, and has served Springfield since 1988. The company’s reputation took a hit after the nationally publicized December 2022 death of Springfield resident Earl Moore Jr., a 35-year-old Black man.
Two white LifeStar employees who were later fired, paramedic Peggy Finley and EMT Peter Cadigan, responded to a medical call that culminated with Cadigan placing and strapping Moore face-down onto an ambulance gurney before Moore’s transport to St. John’s.
County Coroner Jim Allmon ruled Moore’s eventual death a homicide from “compressional and positional asphyxia.”
Cadigan, 53, and Finley, 47, initially were charged with first-degree murder. Cadigan on April 24 pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter in a plea deal with prosecutors. He is scheduled to be sentenced June 23. The next hearing in Finley’s case is set for June 22.
It’s unknown whether Moore’s treatment by former LifeStar workers and that publicity played a role in Springfield Memorial’s suspension of LifeStar. Wright said the hospital’s Aug. 18, 2025, performance improvement plan for LifeStar faulted the company for maintaining supplies of expired medicines and errors in documenting patient conditions.
He said both situations were remedied, patients never received any expired medicines, and a software glitch that caused documentation errors but didn’t compromise patient care has been fixed.
However, Dr. Matthew Johnston, medical director of Springfield Memorial’s EMS system from March 2014 to Feb. 1, 2026, said in an affidavit filed in court that in the 90 days after the performance improvement plan for LifeStar’s Springfield site was issued, he “received information of continuing failure to comply with the PIP, including founded complaints regarding deviations from the standard of care.”
LifeStar said in court documents that Springfield Memorial “cherry-picked” issues in support of the suspension at a Dec. 18 meeting of the hospital EMS system’s local review board.
The local review board affirmed the suspension, which originally was set to take effect Jan. 5. LifeStar then appealed to the State Emergency Medical Services Disciplinary Review Board, which declined to overturn the suspension but gave LifeStar until May 25 to find another supervising hospital.
The state board said in its Feb. 11 written ruling that there is “no clear guidance regarding how a resource hospital can terminate a relationship with an EMS provider agency.” The board also said LifeStar “did not fully comply with” the expectations of the performance improvement plan – in particular the part that required “zero founded complaints about standard of care.”