$4.6 Million Verdict for Family of Veterinarian Who Died of Undiagnosed Sepsis at Kingston Hospital
After trial: HealthAlliance said in June 2016 that it would move to set the verdict aside and reserved the right to appeal. We found no post-trial or appellate decision, so the final outcome is unconfirmed.
Won by Kramer Dillof Livingston & Moore.
An Ulster County jury returned a $4.6 million wrongful death verdict in June 2016 for the family of Walter Friedlander, 63, a Kerhonkson veterinarian who died in February 2011, less than 36 hours after admission to Kingston Hospital. The family said sepsis was never diagnosed. The jury divided responsibility among his primary care physician, a gastroenterologist and the hospital.
What happened
A state Supreme Court jury in Ulster County returned a $4.6 million wrongful death verdict on Tuesday, June 21, 2016, for the family of Walter Friedlander, a 63-year-old veterinarian from Kerhonkson who died in February 2011 at Kingston Hospital. The hospital is now known as the HealthAlliance Hospital Broadway Campus.
On February 13, 2011, Friedlander developed severe pain, and his wife drove him to the Kingston Hospital emergency room. He was admitted. Doctors ran preliminary blood tests and suspected pancreatitis, according to the family's account of the case. The family contended that the physicians never performed the proper tests to confirm or rule out that diagnosis, and that they never recognized a more dangerous condition, sepsis. Friedlander died less than 36 hours after he was admitted. He left a wife and a son.
The family sued the hospital and two physicians who had treated him. Judith A. Livingston of Kramer, Dillof, Livingston & Moore represented the family at trial. She said afterward: 'This was a catastrophe that never should have happened. Had the doctors and hospital staff just performed the basic, most appropriate tests, Mr. Friedlander would be alive today.'
A jury of three women and three men found for the family and divided responsibility for the death among three defendants: Dr. Douglas Heller, Friedlander's primary care physician; Dr. Nicholas Golden, a gastroenterologist who has since retired; and the hospital itself. The reporting on the verdict did not break the $4.6 million down by category of damages.
HealthAlliance said the day after the verdict that it disagreed with the result and would move to set it aside. It also reserved the option to appeal. Heller did not return a call from the Daily Freeman, and Golden could not be reached. A review of the Third Department's published decisions and of CourtListener found no post-trial ruling or appellate decision in the case.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Kramer Dillof Livingston & Moore
All Kramer Dillof Livingston & Moore proven verdicts →Thomas Moore won a $172 million jury verdict in Bronx Supreme Court for a woman left with catastrophic brain damage after FDNY EMTs responded to her 1998 cardiac arrest without essential equipment and advised her family to wait for a second ambulance instead of transporting her immediately.
A Bronx jury awarded $120 million to Jacqueline Martin, a 45-year-old mother who suffered permanent brain damage after three New York City hospitals repeatedly failed to recognize and treat a severe allergic reaction to seizure medication that triggered Stevens-Johnson Syndrome.
In April 2023 a Wayne County jury awarded $96 million to the widow and mother of Jude and Zachary Attianese, a New Jersey father and son killed when a Challenger Motor Freight tractor-trailer rear-ended their car in an I-75 construction zone in 2018. The company had acknowledged responsibility, so the trial addressed damages. The driver was taking medications for Parkinson's disease, and the company had known of his diagnosis since 2015.
When a shunt revision at New York Hospital failed and went unaddressed in 1990, Samuel Desiderio suffered catastrophic brain damage; a jury awarded roughly $50 million and New York's highest court upheld the structured judgment in full.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.