Indianapolis Jury Awards $1 Million to Estate of Alzheimer's Patient Burned at Assisted-Living Fireplace
After trial: The defendants did not challenge the jury's verdict on appeal. On December 23, 2015, the Court of Appeals held the estate was entitled to attorney fees under the residence agreement and remanded to set them.
Won by CohenMalad LLP.
Charles Sindledecker, a resident with Alzheimer's disease at Greentree at Fort Harrison in Indianapolis, was found unresponsive beside the common-room fireplace on December 10, 2010, with a badly burned right arm. A Marion Superior Court jury found the operator primarily at fault and awarded his estate $1,000,020 in 2015. The Court of Appeals later held the estate was owed attorney fees and sent the case back to set them.
What happened
Charles Sindledecker moved into Greentree at Fort Harrison, an assisted-living facility in Indianapolis, in 2006. He had Alzheimer's disease, and for years he spent long stretches of nearly every day in a chair by the fireplace in the common room.
As his dementia progressed, he grew upset when other residents sat in what he considered his chair, and staff removed it. He then stood or sat on his walker near the fireplace. Staff knew that placement was a safety concern and would move him away from the fire, but the problem kept recurring.
On December 10, 2010, staff found Sindledecker unresponsive on the floor by the fireplace and called 911. Before paramedics arrived, they changed his clothing, and they first reported that he had been at a recreational activity. His right arm had been badly burned. He spent ten days in the hospital for burn treatment and eventually needed a skin graft. The wounds did not heal until April 2011.
The injury cost him what independence he had left. He could no longer walk and came to depend on a feeding tube and a catheter. He died on August 10, 2012.
His daughter, Carole Storch, sued the facility's operators, Provision Living, LLC and PVL Tenant Holdings, LLC, in January 2012 as personal representative of his estate. The complaint pleaded negligence and breach of the residence agreement. The estate dismissed the contract claim on January 2, 2015, shortly before trial, and the negligence claim went to a Marion Superior Court jury. Arend J. Abel and Jeffrey A. Hammond of Cohen and Malad represented the estate.
The jury found Greentree primarily at fault and awarded the estate $1,000,020. The trial court then denied the estate's request for attorney fees, reasoning that the dismissal of the contract claim meant the fee clause in the residence agreement no longer applied.
The estate appealed only that ruling. On December 23, 2015, the Indiana Court of Appeals reversed. Judge John Baker wrote that the plain language of the residence agreement compelled an award of attorney fees, and the court remanded the case for the trial court to calculate a reasonable fee for the estate.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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