$50 Million Verdict After a Cardiologist Sent a Patient Home the Night He Died
After trial: The verdict was returned in March 2026 and is too recent for any appeal to have been resolved. No appellate outcome has been reported.
Won by Cunningham Bounds, LLC.
A Mobile County jury awarded the family of Dan Haas $50 million after a 13-day trial, finding that cardiologist Dr. John Galla and his practice mismanaged Haas's cardiac symptoms and sent him home the night he died rather than admitting him to the hospital.
What happened
Dan Haas got home from a hunting trip in December 2020 feeling unwell. On Christmas Day he called his longtime cardiologist, Dr. John Galla, describing severe pain between his shoulder blades. Galla told him to come into the office three days later, on December 28, for evaluation.
Haas made it to that appointment. What his family's lawyers argued happened next was the failure at the center of the case: rather than admit him for observation and treatment of what they said was a life-threatening coronary blockage, Galla examined him and sent him home. Haas died that same night.
The family, Barbara, Sarah, Carrie, and Daniel Haas, sued Galla and his practice, Cardiology Associates of Mobile, in Mobile County Circuit Court. No hospital was named as a defendant. The case turned entirely on what Galla knew about Haas's heart, what the symptoms he described on the phone and in the office should have signaled, and whether a cardiologist familiar with his patient's history had enough information on December 28 to know that sending him home carried a real risk of death.
The family's lawyers, Lucy Tufts and Skip Finkbohner of Cunningham Bounds, argued that Galla was well acquainted with Haas's cardiac condition and had managed it with medication in the past, including clearing him for an elective eye surgery and prescribing blood thinners in its aftermath. That history, they told the jury, made the decision not to hospitalize him on December 28 harder to explain away as a reasonable judgment call rather than a missed diagnosis.
Cardiology experts testified for the family that if Haas had been admitted and started on routine blood thinning treatment that night, his odds of survival would have exceeded 99 percent. The defense disputed that Galla's care fell below the standard required of a treating cardiologist and argued the case for what a reasonable physician would have done with the information available at the time.
The trial ran 13 days before Judge Ben Brooks, unusually long for a single-defendant medical malpractice case, reflecting the volume of expert testimony on both sides about coronary disease, blockages, and what Haas's symptoms should have prompted. On March 12, 2026, the jury returned a verdict for the family: $50 million in wrongful death damages.
After the verdict, Finkbohner said plainly what the case had been about for the family. Haas should have been admitted to the hospital, he said, and if he had been, he would still be alive.
The case is recent enough that no appeal has been filed or reported as of this writing, and no appellate court has reviewed the verdict.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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