$7 Million Verdict Against a Mobile Psychiatric Hospital Over a Delayed Report of a Patient-on-Patient Assault

The patient at the center of this case was 19 years old but functioned, by the assessment used at trial, at roughly the mental level of an 11-year-old. She was admitted to BayPointe Children's Psychiatric Hospital, a facility operated by AltaPointe Health Systems in Mobile, for psychiatric care that her condition required close, structured supervision to deliver safely.

The hospital's own protocol called for checks on patients like her every 15 minutes. That is the interval facilities use for patients who cannot reliably protect themselves and need staff to notice quickly if something goes wrong. In November 2019, that protocol was not followed. The patient went unchecked for roughly an hour and fifteen minutes, five times the interval the hospital had set for her own safety.

During that gap, another patient, a minor, assaulted her behind a locked door. The assault lasted approximately eight minutes. No staff member intervened, because no staff member was checking on her closely enough to know it was happening.

What came after compounded the failure. Rather than report the assault promptly, staff placed the victim in a timeout room, and the incident went unreported for approximately 18 hours. That delay meant medical evaluation, evidence preservation, and any protective response for a patient who could not advocate for herself were all pushed back by most of a day.

Her family sued AltaPointe Health Systems, arguing the facility had failed to meet the minimum standard of care owed to a psychiatric patient who needed supervision to be safe, and that inadequate staffing was the reason the checks that should have caught the assault in progress, or prevented it altogether, did not happen. Bryan Comer of Tobias & Comer Law represented the family at trial.

On March 3, 2023, the jury returned a verdict against AltaPointe: $3 million in compensatory damages and $4 million in punitive damages, $7 million in total. The punitive award reflected the jury's assessment that the facility's failure was not an isolated mistake by one staff member but a symptom of understaffing the hospital had allowed to persist. After the verdict, Comer said publicly that the facility was too short-staffed to safely supervise the patients in its care.

The case surfaced a problem larger than one hospital. Alabama's Department of Mental Health has for years pointed to a statewide workforce shortage in psychiatric care, and state officials have cited staffing and wage pressure as reasons facilities struggle to maintain safe supervision ratios. The verdict did not resolve that shortage. It did put a price on what happens to a vulnerable patient when a facility does not staff to the level its own safety protocols require.