$1.5 Million Wrongful Death Settlement After Hospital Patient, 66, Falls on Freshly Mopped Floor
After trial: The case settled at mediation and no appeal applies. The defendants were not publicly identified, and whether the family received the full amount is not public.
Won by Emroch & Kilduff.
A 66-year-old man in a Virginia hospital, awaiting discharge, slipped on a floor a contractor's housekeeper had just mopped and struck his head while holding an IV pole. He suffered a skull fracture and subdural hematoma and was removed from life support the next day. His family sued the hospital and the contractor that employed the housekeeper in Fredericksburg Circuit Court. The claim settled at mediation on May 22, 2024 for $1.5 million.
What happened
A 66-year-old man was a patient in a Virginia hospital and was waiting to be discharged. A housekeeper employed by an outside contractor had mopped the floor of his room only minutes earlier. When the patient got up from his bed and walked toward the bathroom, holding an IV pole, he slipped on the wet surface and fell.
His head struck the floor with great force. According to Virginia Lawyers Weekly, he suffered a skull fracture and a subdural hematoma, a bleed between the skull and the brain, and he never recovered. He was removed from life support the following day.
His family brought a wrongful death claim in Fredericksburg Circuit Court against two defendants: the hospital and the contractor that employed the housekeeper. The published report does not identify either defendant by name.
Liability was contested. The report says it was 'vigorously disputed,' including the question of whether the patient had been warned about the slippery floor before he fell. In Virginia, a plaintiff's own negligence can defeat a claim entirely, so a dispute over what a patient was told before he stood up carried real weight in the case.
The plaintiffs were represented by Ward Marstiller and Howard Bullock of Richmond, as the report names them. Bullock supplied the case information to the newspaper. The parties did not take the case to trial. They mediated before retired judge Thomas S. Shadrick, and the claim settled on May 22, 2024 for $1.5 million.
The case rested on a plain sequence of events: a floor made wet by someone working for the hospital's contractor, a patient on an IV pole who was walking to the bathroom, and a head injury that ended his life within a day. Virginia's wrongful death statute allows a decedent's survivors to bring a claim when a death results from another party's negligence, and the family named both the hospital and the contractor whose employee had mopped the floor.
Virginia Lawyers Weekly reported the settlement on November 18, 2024, and listed it again in its March 2025 roundup of the state's million-dollar-plus settlements for 2024.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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