$5 Million Settlement: University of Utah Pays for Failing to Protect Student Zhifan Dong
The University of Utah agreed to pay $5 million to the parents of Zhifan Dong, a 19-year-old international student killed by her boyfriend at a Salt Lake City hotel in February 2022, after an internal review confirmed university staff missed repeated warning signs that she was in danger.
What happened
Zhifan Dong came to Salt Lake City from Anyang, China, to study at the University of Utah. She was 19 years old and in her first year when she was killed on February 11, 2022, at a downtown hotel. Her boyfriend, Haoyu Wang, a 26-year-old fellow international student, injected her with a fatal combination of heroin and fentanyl. Wang was charged with first-degree murder and remains incarcerated awaiting trial.
In the weeks before her death, Dong had called police for help and had not accessed her dormitory room for roughly two weeks. University housing staff, student services personnel, and campus police each had contact with information that pointed to a student in serious danger. A university review released in July 2022 documented the failures in plain terms: staff in Housing and Residential Education, the Utah Global office, and the campus public safety division each missed opportunities to intervene. The review described insufficient responses to domestic violence indicators, poor coordination between behavioral health services and law enforcement, and a failure to follow up when Dong went missing from campus.
Parker and McConkie attorney Brian Stewart represented Dong's parents, who are in China, throughout the litigation. The family's position was straightforward: the university had enough information to act, and it did not.
The University of Utah and the Dong family announced the $5 million settlement on February 21, 2023. Because the university is a state institution, the agreement required legislative approval, which the Utah Executive Appropriations Committee granted unanimously through Senate Joint Resolution 11, sponsored by Sen. Jerry Stevenson. The resolution released the state from further liability on all claims arising from Dong's death.
As part of the settlement terms, the university agreed to work with the family to establish a permanent memorial on campus honoring Dong's memory. Stewart said at the time that the family hoped her memory would inspire efforts to prevent intimate partner violence on college campuses.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.KUTV (2News): University of Utah Announces $5 Million Settlement After International Student Murdered·Archived copy
- 2.KSL.com: University of Utah Announces $5M Settlement for International Student Who Was Killed·Archived copy
- 3.Salt Lake Tribune: University of Utah to Pay Millions After Death of International Student Zhifan Dong·Archived copy
- 4.Deseret News: Lawmakers Approve $5 Million Settlement in Death of University of Utah International Student·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Parker & McConkie Personal Injury Lawyers
All Parker & McConkie Personal Injury Lawyers proven verdicts →A federal jury in Utah awarded $52.2 million to the survivors of Rulon Allred, believed at the time to be the largest wrongful death verdict in state history, against the woman who confessed in print to killing him 15 years earlier.
Parker and McConkie secured a $13.5 million settlement for the family of Lauren McCluskey, a University of Utah track athlete murdered on campus after police failed to act on her repeated stalking reports.
Salt Lake County paid $1.5 million to the mother of a 25-year-old woman who died of methamphetamine toxicity at the county jail after nursing staff dismissed her overdose symptoms as a panic attack and left her unmonitored in a prone position.
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.