$5 Million Verdict After Brain-Injured Veteran Suffocated During Prone Restraint at FINR Facility
Won by Swope Rodante PA.
A Hardee County jury awarded $5 million to the parents of Michael Lieux, a former Marine with a brain injury who died of positional asphyxia after FINR staff pinned him face-down using a technique the facility called 'therapeutic containment.'
What happened
Michael Lieux served in the United States Marine Corps before sustaining a severe brain injury that left him in need of long-term residential care. He became a resident at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation, known as FINR, a private facility in Wauchula, Hardee County, that specialized in care for brain-injured patients.
The incident that ended Lieux's life began when FINR staff moved to subdue him using a physical technique the facility described as 'therapeutic containment.' Five employees held him face-down on the floor in what the medical examiner later classified as a prone restraint. He died at the scene. The Hardee County medical examiner ruled the cause of death 'positional asphyxia due to restraint' and the manner of death homicide.
Lieux's parents, Una Marshall and Russell Lieux, filed a wrongful death action against FINR. The firm of Swope, Rodante P.A. represented the family, with attorney Shea Moxon handling the case through trial and on appeal. Counsel argued that the prone restraint was an unreasonably dangerous method of intervention for a patient with Lieux's condition and that FINR staff applied it in a manner that cut off his ability to breathe.
The Hardee County jury sided with the family. It awarded $2.5 million to each parent for their past mental pain and suffering, totaling $5 million. The jury declined to award punitive damages, finding the compensatory award sufficient.
FINR appealed to Florida's Second District Court of Appeal, challenging multiple rulings from the trial court. The appellate panel affirmed the judgment in full on December 8, 2006, concluding that FINR had not established any error requiring reversal. The $5 million verdict stood.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Swope Rodante PA
All Swope Rodante PA proven verdicts →A Hillsborough County jury awarded $30.1 million to a passenger left with a permanent brain injury after the truck driver's insurer refused to offer more than its $100,000 policy limit, a verdict the Florida Supreme Court unanimously preserved in 2023.
A Manatee County jury returned an $11 million verdict, including more than $9.8 million in punitive damages, against road-construction subcontractor L.E. Myers Co. after the firm proved it failed to close a required traffic lane, leading to a fatal collision in the work zone.
A Hillsborough County jury awarded $6.7 million to Angel Martinez and his wife after contaminated oysters served at a Tampa seafood restaurant triggered Guillain-Barre syndrome that left him paralyzed from the waist down for months.
Anthony Ellis, 21, was hit by a left-turning driver while riding his motorcycle on US 301 in Riverview, Florida, in January 2016. He needed knee reconstruction and had broken bones in his foot. A Hillsborough County jury awarded about $3.83 million in May 2019 after a four-day trial in which the defense disputed fault.
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.