You better think twice before putting your blind- drunk pal into the back seat of a car for the ride home.
A Manhattan judge ruled that a lawsuit can go forward against Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center — whose security guards piled their lieutenant into a vehicle and he choked to death on his vomit as his wife was driving him home.
The guards left 260-pound John Gillern “worse off than when they found him,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Kenney wrote in her ruling made public Wednesday.
She added that there was a “foreseeable risk” that Gillern, 48, could have suffocated in that position after a hospital Christmas party on Dec. 7, 2012.
He had been throwing back beers and shots until he passed out, according to court papers.
When his wife, Jacqueline, 49, a nurse at the hospital, arrived to pick him up, it took three guards using a luggage cart to get John into the back seat of the family SUV. He was snoring on the nearly two-hour drive home.
At their destination, Jacqueline saw that John was “grayish and not breathing.”
John was pronounced dead at a local hospital at 1 a.m.
He died of “alcohol intoxication and positional asphyxia,” according to an autopsy report.
His blood-alcohol level was .28 — more than three times the legal limit — four hours after his last drink.
Jacqueline testified in her deposition that “she asked the Sloan security guards who lifted Gillern into the car whether Gillern needed to go to the hospital,” court papers state.
“She was told that he did not have to go to the hospital, that he had just had too much to drink and needed to sleep it off.”
Sloan employees were negligent for removing Gillern from the party — which took place at Rockefeller University just a block from the Upper East Side hospital — and wedging him into the back of a “compact vehicle,” the ruling states.
The Gillerns’ lawyer, Alan Ripka, told The Post that if someone is passed out, “it would be the obligation of people involved in health care, at a minimum, to call 911. That’s really the crux of it.”
The wrongful-death suit seeks unspecified money damages.
The hospital’s attorney declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Frank Rosario