SANTA ANA, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - A California drug rehabilitation clinic lost all of its arguments after appealing a $3.9 million jury verdict against it over the death of a patient who committed suicide by leaping from a roof just minutes after a staff member checked in on him.
Jeffrey Green was 33 when he checked himself into Anaheim Lighthouse to detoxify from opioids he had been using since he was 16. While his father had committed suicide several years before, Green repeatedly told staffers he wasn’t considering suicide and signed a “no harm contract” in which he agreed he wouldn’t hurt himself or commit suicide.
Midway through detoxification treatment, he gave a staffer a note saying he said “Im barely holding on,” and “If I leave the clinic can you tell the police Im suicidal to hold me.” A counselor immediately spent an hour assessing Green’s risk of suicide, during which the patient denied he intended to kill himself. He received a dose of detox medicine a little after 6 p.m. and a staff member checked on him at 6:25 p.m., shortly before he was scheduled to join group therapy. Instead, Green went to the roof and jumped to his death.
Green’s mother Barbara sued for wrongful death, negligence, negligent hiring and supervision, and emotional distress. The judge dismissed claims of negligent hiring and supervision and emotional distress, but allowed the negligence claims to go to trial.
The plaintiff’s lawyer told jurors during closing arguments Lighthouse was negligent for allowing roof access, while the defense quoted Lighthouse’s chief executive as saying “we cannot barricade access to the roof because the fire department won’t allow us.” The plaintiff lawyer then told the jury this wasn’t true, and the defense objected. The trial judge overruled the objection.
The jury awarded $3.9 million in damages but found Lighthouse only 65% liable, leaving Green’s mother with $2.5 million. Lighthouse appealed, saying the judge failed to instruct the jury on the defenses of superseding cause and premises liability.
Lighthouse appealed, but the Fourth Appellate District refused to overturn the verdict in an Aug. 31 opinion written by Justice Kathleen O'Leary.
Lighthouse argued the jury should have been instructed on superseding cause, which is an affirmative defense the defendant must prove. Suicide is generally a superseding cause unless it was foreseeable, and foreseeability is a fact question the jury must decide. An appeals court found the suicide of a 17-year-old in police custody was a superseding act, for example, even though the jury found the officer on duty was negligent for failing to make hourly checks on the youth as required.
Lighthouse cited that case to argue it couldn’t have foreseen Green’s suicide, but the appeals said the jury took that option off the table when it found the rehab clinic negligent in his death.
“The only possible basis for the jury’s negligence finding here was that Green’s suicide was foreseeable to Lighthouse,” the court ruled. “This finding rendered the superseding cause defense inapplicable.”
The appeals court also rejected Lighthouse’s argument the jury should have been instructed about premises liability, since the plaintiff didn’t make that claim at trial, other than the lawyer’s disputed statement in closing arguments that the fire department didn’t prohibit Lighthouse from barricading the roof.
The appeals court similarly said Lighthouse couldn’t object to rebuttal testimony from a fire inspector who testified that the Lighthouse CEO was wrong and there were no fire code regulations prohibiting barricading access to the roof.