$200 Million Verdict for a 92-Year-Old Who Died Strapped in Her Wheelchair at the Bottom of a Nursing Home Stairwell, Returned Against a Defunct Company That Never Showed Up or Paid

The honest way to describe this verdict is the way the Tampa Bay Times did at the time: record-breaking, and won without a defense. When a Pinellas County jury awarded $200 million over Elvira Nunziata's death in January 2012, no lawyer sat at the defense table. The company held liable, Trans Health Management Inc., was defunct, its parent was in a Maryland receivership, and the family's own lawyers alleged that the investors who really stood behind the chain had simply chosen not to defend the case. The verdict was never going to be collected as written. What it did was fix, on the public record, responsibility for one of the ugliest nursing home deaths in Florida memory.

Elvira Nunziata was 92 and had dementia. She lived at the Pinellas Park Care and Rehab Center, a facility with a history of deficiency citations that former aides described as chronically understaffed. One day in October 2004, strapped into her wheelchair, she went through a stairwell door that was supposed to be locked and alarmed. Former aides testified that staff often disabled the alarm so they could slip out to smoke. She toppled a full story down the steps. More than an hour passed before anyone noticed she was missing. She was found at the bottom of the stairwell, still strapped into the chair, and did not survive.

Her son sued in 2005 on behalf of her estate, with Richard Nunziata serving as personal representative. The case was built by Tampa's Wilkes & McHugh, the firm that made Trans Healthcare litigation its signature and now practices as Wilkes & Associates; its attorneys Bennie Lazzara Jr., Isaac Ruiz-Carus, and Joanna Greber appear as the estate's counsel in the appellate record. By the time the case reached trial in January 2012, Trans Health Management had defaulted and dissolved, and the damages trial proceeded unopposed. The jury deliberated less than an hour before returning $60 million in compensatory damages and $140 million in punitive damages, then the largest nursing home verdict in the country.

Even the appeal showed how hollow the losing side had become. In December 2014 Florida's Second District Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal brought in Trans Health Management's name, holding that an administratively dissolved corporation had no right to prosecute it.

The money question took years longer and ended small. The Nunziata estate filed its $200 million claim in the involuntary bankruptcy of Fundamental Long Term Care Inc. in Tampa, joining five other estates of Trans Healthcare residents, all with what the Eleventh Circuit called empty-chair verdicts, in accusing the chain's owners of shuffling assets beyond creditors' reach. After a twelve-day bench trial, the six estates settled with the remaining defendants for a combined $23.7 million. Divided six ways, that is a sliver of the verdict. The $200 million stands as a jury's unanswered judgment about how a 92-year-old woman came to die alone in a stairwell, rendered against a company that could not be bothered to appear and never paid a dollar of it.