PHOENIX (Legal Newsline) - A father whose twins were murdered by their mentally ill mother can’t sue a crisis clinic for failing to warn him of the risk, an Arizona appeals court ruled.
While the clinic had a duty under state law to report any evidence of child abuse or neglect, the court said, even the father admitted he didn’t suspect the mother of his children would commit murder.
Samuel Avitia sued Crisis Preparation and Recovery and other medical facilities that treated Mireya Alejandra Lopez (identified only as “Mother” in the opinion) after she drowned her twin 2-year-old boys in a bathtub in 2015. Lopez and Avitia were never married and she had court-ordered custody of the children. Lopez also had a history of severe mental illness and the twins were cared for by her mother during her frequent hospitalizations.
Crisis Prep evaluates patients for court-ordered involuntary treatment. Clinic professionals had evaluated Lopez in 2011, 2013 and again in 2014, after family members said she had threatened to harm the twins’ babysitters. A Crisis Prep staffer determined she didn’t qualify for involuntary treatment because she functioned well most of the time when she took her medication. A court later found Lopez was a danger to herself but not others and ordered her to attend outpatient treatment.
More than a year later, she drowned her sons, and a year after that Avitia filed wrongful-death claims against the state, the county and numerous health care providers. He claimed Crisis Prep was liable for the death of his sons because it had a duty to report Lopez’s abuse and neglect of her children to law enforcement.
A trial court dismissed the case against Crisis Prep, and the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division One, upheld the dismissal in a Nov. 8 decision. While Arizona law once included foreseeability in the legal definition of a duty, the court ruled, the state Supreme Court eliminated that several years ago and under the stricter standard in place now Crisis Prep had no duty to protect the twins against a risk of murder it had no reason to suspect.
“Crisis Prep’s contacts with Mother did not disclose any information that the twins were, or had been, victims of abuse or neglect or that Mother even made any threats to harm them,” the court ruled. While “There was no abuse or neglect to report.”
In its decision, the court cited several Arizona Supreme Court opinions including a 2021 case where the Deer Valley School District was protected against liability for a student’s murder. In that decision, the court said school officials didn’t have any information suggesting a “known and tangible risk” that one student would shoot another in a house off campus.