$5.2 Million Verdict for Three Ventilator Patients Who Died at Blue Ridge

Blue Ridge Health Care Center was a skilled nursing facility in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a unit for residents who depended on ventilators to breathe. Its operators, Care One, LLC and Care Virginia Management, LLC, pressed to cut costs at the building. In May 2011 the facility's administrator resigned, telling others that his superiors "continued to push him to cut supplies and staff to levels that would not allow the staff to properly care for the patients." A respiratory therapist later testified that "the bill hadn't been paid, so supplies weren't coming."

Three residents died over the following months. Del Ray Baird was found with his ventilator and its alarms switched off for an unknown stretch of time. Because the unit was short staffed, the therapist assigned to him could not check whether the alarms in his room were on. Bettie Mae Kee was found with her breathing apparatus pulled from her neck and no alarm or monitor in use, and no sitter on hand because of the staffing cuts. Elizabeth Jones died when staff could not replace her tracheostomy tube in time, a delay her family traced to a shortage of bedside supplies.

Henson Fuerst represented the three families. Rachel Fuerst and Thomas Henson Jr. tried the case in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, before Judge Terrence W. Boyle. They built it on the operators' own arithmetic. An accounting expert testified that staffing the ventilator unit below the required minimum saved the companies $1,523,939.16 during 2011. Witnesses said management had been warned repeatedly that the staffing levels were a safety risk, and that a staffing coordinator who complained was fired.

After a four-day trial, the jury returned verdicts for all three families on February 16, 2017. It awarded $650,000 in compensatory damages, then set the punitive damages for each estate at $1,523,939.16, the exact sum the firm showed the operators had saved by understaffing. The punitive figures alone came to about $4.57 million, and the full verdict reached roughly $5.2 million.

The trial judge then threw out the punitive award, finding the families had not offered enough to support it. They appealed. On August 2, 2018, the Fourth Circuit reversed and reinstated the punitive verdict, holding that a jury could find the operators had shown "the conscious and intentional disregard of and indifference to the rights and safety of others." It was the first published decision in that circuit to sustain punitive damages in a nursing home wrongful death case.

When the case returned to the district court, North Carolina's statutory cap on punitive damages limited that portion to $2,050,000. With compensatory damages and accrued interest, the three families recovered $3,007,922.43.