$1.15 Million Settlement for Estate of Teacher Who Died of Embolism After Restaurant Doorway Fall
After trial: The settlement was final when the stipulation of dismissal was filed in September 2019. The later appeals to the Appellate Division and the New Jersey Supreme Court concerned only how the settlement is credited against the remaining medical defendants.
Won by Lomurro Munson LLC and Lomurro, Munson, Comer, Brown & Schottland.
Jennifer Collum-Glassman, a 45-year-old teacher, fractured her left ankle when she tripped leaving a Red Bank restaurant on March 25, 2017, and died of a pulmonary embolism on April 26 after ankle surgery. Her husband sued as executor of her estate. The restaurant's owners and operators, Juanito's, Inc. and KLE Properties, LLC, settled the wrongful death and survival claims before trial in September 2019.
What happened
On March 25, 2017, Jennifer Collum-Glassman, a 45-year-old special education teacher at a local high school and the mother of two teenage sons, stopped at Juanito's, a restaurant in Red Bank, New Jersey, to pick up take-out for her family. As she left, she tripped in the doorway and fell. The fall left her with a comminuted trimalleolar fracture of the left ankle: the ankle was broken in three places, with the bone in fragments.
She was admitted to Riverview Medical Center, part of Hackensack Meridian Health. Surgeons performed an open reduction and internal fixation of the ankle on March 30, and she was discharged on April 19. A week later, on April 26, the day before her 46th birthday, she suffered a saddle pulmonary embolism and died. According to the autopsy, as quoted in the estate's interrogatory answers, the cause of death was the embolism due to immobilization following the ankle fractures from the fall.
Her husband, Todd Glassman, brought a wrongful death and survival action as executor of her estate in the Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division, Monmouth County, on June 28, 2018. The first defendants were the businesses that owned and ran the restaurant, Juanito's, Inc. and KLE Properties, LLC, who were accused of negligently controlling, inspecting and maintaining the premises. The estate was represented by Christina Vassiliou Harvey and Jonathan H. Lomurro of Lomurro, Munson, Comer, Brown & Schottland, with Alan J. Weinberg on the appellate briefs.
The estate later amended its complaint to add Riverview, four doctors and three nurses as defendants. It alleged that their negligence during the ankle surgery injured her right leg, leaving her less mobile, and that they failed to give appropriate anticoagulation medication, which led to the fatal embolism.
In September 2019, about fifteen months after the suit was filed and before any trial, the estate and the property defendants filed a stipulation of dismissal. The settlement was $1,150,000, which KLE Properties agreed to pay. The estate's lawyers disclosed the figure in an application asking the court for an apportionment hearing and for a law guardian to represent the couple's minor child.
The claims against the medical defendants stayed in the case, and the settlement then became the subject of a published ruling. The trial court gave the hospital defendants a dollar-for-dollar credit for the $1.15 million. The Appellate Division reversed in December 2020, and the New Jersey Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion decided December 23, 2021, agreed that the credit had no place under the state's Comparative Negligence Act. It replaced the credit with a jury apportionment of damages between the fall and the alleged malpractice. None of that disturbed the settlement itself, which had been final since 2019.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Lomurro Munson LLC
All Lomurro Munson LLC proven verdicts →A Monmouth County jury awarded John Fiore $6.5 million in compensatory damages and $11.15 million in punitive damages after a drug-impaired Highlight Motor Freight driver caused a multivehicle crash on Route 440 in Perth Amboy that killed another motorist and left Fiore unable to work.
Kristen Dondero was 31 weeks pregnant and under the care of a maternal-fetal specialist when Hackensack University Medical Center sent her home on September 6, 2018 with decreased fetal movement and early labor symptoms. She returned two days later and learned her son had died in utero; the delivery that followed tore her uterus and ended in an emergency hysterectomy, blood transfusions, and further surgery under an induced coma. After five years of litigation marked by the hospital's sworn denials that any internal review of her care existed, and an Appellate Division ruling that those denials could support a fraudulent concealment claim, HMH Hospitals Corp. agreed on July 1, 2025 to pay Kristen and Andrew Dondero $6.8 million. The case against the obstetrician and his practice continued.
Calreather Graham was left in a vegetative state on January 2, 2008, when she went into cardiac arrest at Somerset Medical Center after a beta blocker was given following surgery. Her claims against two doctors, the hospital and the nurse who gave the drug settled immediately before trial for $2,725,000 in the aggregate. One physician, a critical care specialist, went to trial alone.
A 17-year-old Old Bridge High School student was riding in a friend's pickup on Englishtown Road in Old Bridge at about 3:50 a.m. on July 6, 2019 when an Acura traveling an estimated 105 mph hit the truck from behind. She was thrown from the pickup and died at the scene; the Acura's passenger also died, and its driver later blew a 0.193 and was sentenced to 17 years for aggravated manslaughter. Her parents' estate suit claimed two Old Bridge bars served him while visibly intoxicated, and on January 10, 2024 the bars' insurers agreed to pay $1.1 million on top of $115,000 already paid by the two drivers' auto carriers, for a total of $1,215,000.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.