Kenney Bui: Wrongful Death Settlement Against Highline Public Schools Over Fatal Second-Impact Concussion

On September 4, 2015, Kenney Bui, a 17-year-old junior at Evergreen High School in the Highline Public Schools district south of Seattle, sustained a concussion during a varsity football game against Nathan Hale High School. He was pulled from play that night under Washington's Lystedt Law, which requires written medical clearance before a student athlete can return following a suspected concussion.

Twenty-eight days later, on October 2, 2015, Kenney was back on the field for a game against Highline High School. He took a hit, complained of a severe headache on the sideline, and collapsed. He was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and placed on life support. Three days later, his family made the decision to discontinue life support. Physicians identified the cause as Second Impact Syndrome, a condition in which a second concussion, suffered before the brain has fully recovered from the first, produces catastrophic and often fatal swelling.

Kenney's parents, Ngon Van Bui and Nguyet-Sen Huynh Le, filed a wrongful death suit in King County Superior Court in October 2018 against Highline Public Schools and the pediatrician who had cleared Kenney to return to play. Their attorneys were Richard H. Adler, Melissa D. Carter, and Arthur D. Leritz of Adler Giersch, PS. The complaint alleged that Kenney's physician failed to communicate the seriousness of the initial concussion to the family, whose primary language is Vietnamese, and that the school district allowed Kenney to resume full-contact practice and competition before the required return-to-play protocol was actually complete.

The school district's position was that Kenney had been 'cleared for our Return to Play protocol,' but the family's legal team contended that the formal steps mandated by state law were never fully executed. The case centered on whether the district's oversight of its concussion protocols, and the physician's duty to ensure informed consent from a non-English-speaking family, met the standard of care required under the Lystedt Law.

The parties reached a settlement in 2020, the terms of which were not publicly disclosed. Beyond the litigation itself, the case produced a durable regulatory change: the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association adopted Rule 17.11.5, formally named the 'Kenney Bui Rule,' requiring written clearance from both an approved medical professional and the school's athletic director, plus uniform use of a WIAA-designated return-to-competition form. Richard Adler, who had drafted the original Lystedt Law in 2006, helped shape the new rule. As of the 2020-21 school year, every student athlete in Washington state returning from a suspected concussion must clear both those checkpoints before stepping back onto a field.