$45.5 Million Verdict for Family of Developmentally Disabled Woman Who Drowned in Phoenix Group Home
Won by Knapp & Roberts.
A Maricopa County jury awarded $45.5 million to the family of a 26-year-old woman with severe developmental disabilities who drowned while unsupervised at a Phoenix group home operated by Developmental Systems Inc.
What happened
Ilana Solomon was 26 years old, non-verbal, and severely impaired by developmental delays that also affected her vision and hearing. She lived in a north Phoenix apartment alongside one other resident with disabilities, under a care arrangement managed by Developmental Systems Inc. (DSI) and its partner organization, American Habilitation Services Inc. The State of Arizona, which licensed and funded the placement, was also named as a defendant.
On the day she died, Ilana drowned in a bathtub after being left without direct supervision. Her parents, Martin and Judy Solomon, filed a wrongful death lawsuit arguing that DSI and its co-defendants had failed to provide the continuous, attentive oversight their daughter required and that the entire system of oversight over the group home had broken down.
At trial, Craig Knapp of Knapp and Roberts presented evidence bearing on staffing decisions, training practices, and the supervision protocols in place at the time. The claim was not simply that one caregiver made an error; the family argued that the organizations responsible for Ilana's safety had chosen to cut corners in ways that made a fatal outcome foreseeable. Knapp told reporters after the verdict: 'This was a case of a company that chose to betray the trust of a family.'
On December 1, 2004, the jury returned a verdict of $45.5 million for the Solomon family. The Arizona Republic reported the result the following day, and the case later appeared in an Arizona State Bar compilation of the state's largest civil verdicts. No public appellate opinion reducing or reversing the award has been located in Arizona court records.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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