Florida Nursing home death at facility sparks $200M jury verdict Elderly woman fell down stairs while strapped in her wheelchair

By Sylvia Hsieh The Daily Record Newswire BOSTON -- The son of a nursing home patient who died after falling down a staircase while strapped in her wheelchair has been awarded $200 million against a Florida facility. Elvira Nunziata, 92, was able to get through the exit door and down the stairs because employees routinely disabled fire alarms on the exits so they could use the stairs without the alarm sounding. "Because of the corporate desire to keep costs low, they didn't do elevator maintenance and the staff was fed up with having to wait for the elevator," said Isaac Ruiz-Carus, an attorney at Wilkes & McHugh in Tampa, Fla., who represented the plaintiff. Patient alarms that Nunziata could have sounded to get help were also disabled by employees, who removed the batteries, according to Ruiz-Carus. As a result, Nunziata was not discovered until up to an hour after her fall by a maintenance worker, Ruiz-Carus said. "One big emotional factor was that when she fell to the bottom of the stairs she was not dead. She sat at the bottom for as long as one hour and eventually asphyxiated in her own blood," said Ruiz-Carus. "The photos of her when they found her at the bottom of the stairs are the worst photos I've ever seen. Worse than murder." The two-and-a-half day trial was not defended at trial despite a last-minute skirmish over whether defense lawyers could appear. The 2005 lawsuit was defended until 2011, when counsel for the defendant, Trans Health Management Inc., which managed the nursing home, withdrew. The plaintiff eventually got a default judgment when the defendant didn't appoint new counsel. The day before trial, defense attorneys tried to enter appearances and erase the default judgment. At a hearing on the morning of trial, Ruiz-Carus argued that the lawyers should be stricken because Trans Health Management never consented to representation. He also pointed to a Florida statute that takes away a corporation's right to defend itself in court where the corporation failed to file annual reports. The trial judge found that the defendant's certificate of authority to do business was revoked for failing to file an annual report. The judge also found that Trans Health Management did not consent to being represented by the defense firms because the attorneys admitted they had not been retained by Trans Health Management, but instead were retained by a receiver for a company that sold Trans Health Management in 2006. Defense attorneys Carl Hagwood and Marsha G. Rydberg did not return several calls seeking comment for this article. The short trial revealed a bevy of evidence of mismanagement and misuse of money. Four former nursing home employees testified that they remembered Nunziata as a sweet lady who used to be a gardener and had a tendency to wander outside. They also testified that because of severe understaffing they resorted to disabling alarms so they wouldn't have to respond to patient calls. The maintenance director testified that for $5,000, the facility could have equipped all the doors with a special lock that would reset an alarm that had been disabled each time the door was opened. A state investigation and citation that put the facility's license in jeopardy uncovered that the nursing home failed to investigate the sexual assault of a patient. Ruiz-Carus asked the jury to award $100 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive damages. The jury instead awarded $60 million in compensatories and $140 million in punitives. Published: Mon, Jan 30, 2012