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An aggressive pneumonia caused by a common organism is being blamed for killing a 39-year-old Tucson man who died after waiting eight hours in a local emergency room while his wife says she pleaded for help.

A U.S. Centers for Disease Control report says Robert Sweitzer died Feb. 10 at St. Mary's Hospital of "necrotizing pneumonia" caused by a common bacterium, staphylococcus aureus. Generally, staph is an organism that can be successfully treated with antibiotics.

"This is pretty uncommon, to see a young, healthy person die within a relatively short amount of time from a fairly common organism," Pima County Medical Examiner Dr. Bruce Parks said Tuesday.

Parks said it appears Sweitzer died of a particularly virulent form of staph called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

MRSA, often called a "superbug," is growing in prevalence across the country and does not respond to penicillins and cephalosporins, the class of drugs normally used to treat staph infections. However, it can be treated with specialized, "second-line" antibiotics.

"It seems logical that it's MRSA, but I can't say without a doubt," Parks said.

In the CDC analysis, tissue from Sweitzer's lungs tested negative for hantavirus, a potentially fatal respiratory disease, which Parks said was one possibility considered in the unusual death.

Parks' office, along with the Arizona Department of Health Services, had sent tissue samples to the CDC for further examination because of the concern hantavirus might be involved.

Also, two organisms were grown from the lung culture during the autopsy at the Pima County Forensic Science Center, either one of which could have caused the infection. Those organisms were klebsiella and MRSA. Health officials wanted to know which of those organisms, if either, was most likely the cause, Parks said.

Since the CDC's findings were consistent with a staph infection, Parks said he believes the death was probably related to MRSA.

Sweitzer's widow, Rachel, confirmed Monday that she'd seen the autopsy report but declined comment other than to say she remains devastated by the loss of her husband.

Until hours before he visited the emergency room at St. Mary's Hospital on Saturday, Feb. 9, Robert Sweitzer had been a healthy man who worked full time, worked out regularly and was active in the animal-welfare community.

Though he'd felt he was coming down with a cold, Sweitzer volunteered at a local cat shelter all morning that Saturday. By afternoon he was feeling worse, coughing and losing energy. He was also suffering intense pain in his lower back.

When he started breathing hard, the Sweitzers went to St. Mary's ER at 6:30 p.m., his wife has said. It was packed, during the start of Tucson's severe flu outbreak.

At 7 p.m. he was called for triage, a preliminary assessment of the severity of his symptoms. His vital signs were stable. He was assessed as needing a low level of care, hospital officials have said.

Rachel Sweitzer has said his condition was never reassessed in the next eight hours, despite her pleas for help as she said his pain became unbearable and his breathing grew more strained.

That day, some 170 patients flooded St. Mary's ER, creating a bottleneck and resulting in waits well beyond eight hours for many patients. Hospital officials called in more staff and opened additional inpatient beds to try to handle the onslaught.

After 2:30 a.m., when Sweitzer was called to see an emergency physician, X-rays showed severe pneumonia — his lungs filled with fluid, by his wife's account. Barely able to breathe, he was placed on full oxygen. Morphine did not control his pain.

His heart stopped twice. They resuscitated him once, but it failed a second time, and they tried unsuccessfully to intubate him.

He was pronounced dead about 7 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 10.

A spokeswoman for St. Mary's Hospital would not comment Tuesday.

Though he could not comment on Sweitzer's case, local infectious-disease expert Dr. Sean Elliott said about 5 percent of MRSA infections are invasive — not skin-based — and therefore more difficult to detect.

When MRSA enters the bloodstream it's like having chemical poisoning, he said.

"It may be a very, very subtle entry into the skin and it gets into the bloodstream," said Elliott, an associate professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Arizona and the medical director of infection prevention at University Medical Center. "Once it's past the skin barrier, it can be quite a problem."

Those MRSA infections can result in such illnesses as pneumonia, bone infection, and endocarditis, he said. The sufferer may at first appear to have the flu but will get increasingly sick and eventually have chest pain and difficulty breathing.

"It can be very fast," he said. "Rapid death with MRSA is reported."

He added that such cases are extremely rare, and if caught early enough can be treated with special antibiotics.