$15 Million Verdict for Death of 9-Year-Old in Alabama DHR Custody After Untreated Sickle Cell Crisis
Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys' Andrew Moak, with co-counsel from Turnbull, Holcomb & LeMoine, won a unanimous $15 million wrongful death verdict on August 5, 2022, for the estate of a nine-year-old boy with sickle cell anemia who died in 2013 while in the custody of the Alabama Department of Human Resources. The Montgomery County jury found the boy's DHR caseworker and foster caregiver responsible for delaying the medical care that could have saved him.
What happened
The boy was nine years old, a ward of the State of Alabama, living in a foster home under the supervision of the Department of Human Resources. He had sickle cell anemia, a serious, chronic disease, but a manageable one. With his medication, close monitoring, and limits on physical exertion, children with his condition live with it. What they cannot survive is being ignored when a crisis starts.
In May 2013, that is what the jury found happened. The lawsuit alleged that the boy's DHR caseworker, Kristi Kelley, and his foster caregiver, Becky Van Gilder, disregarded his symptoms and complaints as his condition deteriorated, and that medical care was withheld until it was too late to matter. By the time he reached Children's of Alabama in Birmingham, the sickle cell crisis had gone too far. He died there on May 30, 2013.
The suit brought by his estate took the better part of a decade to reach a courtroom. When it finally did, in Montgomery County Circuit Court in the summer of 2022, Andrew Moak of Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys tried the case alongside Brett Turnbull and Robert LeMoine of Turnbull, Holcomb & LeMoine. Their argument was simple: the adults who had taken legal responsibility for a medically fragile child knew his rules, the medication, the monitoring, the warning signs, and disregarded them.
The defense answered for a state agency and a foster parent, but the jury did not deliberate long. On August 5, 2022, after a little over an hour, it returned a unanimous verdict of $15 million against the caseworker and the foster caregiver. Under Alabama's unusual wrongful death statute, every dollar of such an award is punitive, a jury's measure not of the loss but of the wrong.
DHR declined to comment on the verdict when reached by Montgomery's WSFA. Moak said afterward that the child died because the adults who took responsibility for his life disregarded their rules and their training, and that the verdict was the jury saying that a foster child's life is worth the same vigilance as anyone else's.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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