Ende v. Parkside Manor: $4 Million Punitive Verdict After an 89-Year-Old Memory Care Resident Froze to Death
Won by Habush Habush & Rottier S.C..
Benjamin Wagner and Molly Lavin of Habush Habush & Rottier won a $4 million punitive damages verdict in Kenosha County after Helen Ende, an 89-year-old dementia patient, wandered out of a short-staffed assisted living facility and died of hypothermia.
What happened
Just after midnight on December 19, 2022, Helen Ende walked out of Parkside Manor, the Kenosha assisted living and memory care facility where she lived. She was 89 and had dementia. Surveillance video recorded her leaving at 12:41 a.m. into single-digit cold. Roughly seven or eight minutes later she returned to the door and tried to get back inside. No one let her in.
Her exit set off a door alarm. Facility policy required staff to account for every resident and to check the grounds outside whenever that alarm sounded. Instead, the alarm rang for about half an hour before a worker shut it off, and no one went out to look. Ende was missing for roughly seven hours before staff realized she was gone. By then she had died of exposure. Her bed had not been slept in and she was still wearing the clothes her family had seen her in the day before.
The lawsuit was brought by her son, Brian Ende, on behalf of himself and his mother's estate. The defendants were Parkside Manor and its parent company, Encore Senior Living, the operator responsible for staffing and running the memory care unit where Ende lived.
The family was represented by Benjamin Wagner and Molly Lavin of Habush Habush & Rottier S.C. At trial, Wagner argued that the failure that night was not a single isolated lapse. He told jurors that staff had repeatedly ignored the protocols meant to keep memory care residents safe, and that management knew about the pattern and allowed it to continue. The case turned on a basic point: a facility that markets memory care, where residents are known to wander, has to provide the staffing and the follow-through its own rules require.
The Kenosha County jury agreed. On November 21, 2024, it found that Parkside Manor had intentionally disregarded Ende's safety, the finding Wisconsin law demands before punitive damages can be awarded. The panel imposed $4 million in punitive damages against the facility and Encore.
The case did not end the operator's exposure. Three Parkside Manor employees were later criminally charged in connection with Ende's death, each accused of recklessly abusing a patient and causing death, a Class C felony in Wisconsin that carries up to 40 years in prison.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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