DP (name abbreviated for privacy of the family) attended an off-campus party at a friend’s house for DP’s 21st birthday. DP was a senior at a local college here in South Florida. The partygoers were his fraternity/sorority friends, but it was not an official fraternity/sorority event. On his way to his friend’s house, DP purchased a bottle of rum and brought it with him to the party.
DP hung out at the party for a few hours and got extremely drunk. That night, he drank nearly the entire bottle of rum and took multiple shots of Hennessy. He was intoxicated to the point of falling down (at one point, he fell out of a chair and landed pretty much flat on his face). The defense toxicologist in our case estimated that DP had 17 drinks that night. We did not intend to contest that.
As the night progressed, DP’s friends saw what was going on and realized that he'd had enough. They decided it would be best to take him back to his college dorm room where he lived. His friends helped him down the stairs and into a friend's car. This friend drove DP back to his school dorm and they arrived on campus a little before midnight.
His friend got him back to the school and was going to take him back up to his dorm room. The testimony pertaining to DP’s physical condition at this time was something of a ‘mixed bag’. A couple of guards for US Security, the private security company at the school campus, said that DP was mumbling. A 19-year-old kid who went to that same college said that he'd never seen anybody that drunk. This witness claimed that he told a security guard that DP should be taken to the hospital.
It took the physical efforts of three men to get DP from the ground floor up to his dorm room. These three men (one of whom was the friend who drove DP to campus) literally picked DP up off the ground and started carrying him up to his dorm room on the second floor. These were three big guys who were carrying DP, who himself weighed about 220 pounds. One of the students carrying DP was the dorm building’s Resident Assistant (who was also DP’s roommate).
This was all happening just before midnight. At that time, there was a US Security guard on duty at the dorm, and he escorted the three guys carrying DP upstairs. He held the elevator and hallway doors open for them.
One factor that we believe substantially impacted the course of our case was a surveillance video from the dorm building. The school had a surveillance camera set up which would film most of the hallway of the second floor. For about 30 seconds, we can see the three men struggling to carry DP out of the elevator and down the hallway. The surveillance footage made it very clear that DP was unconscious when the men were carrying him to his room.
The 19-year-old student who saw DP being carried into the building earlier had told the guys to put him on his side so that if he throws up, he won't aspirate (i.e., vomit into his lungs). So, they did that, and the security guard for US Security said that he would check on him intermittently. The Resident Assistant/roommate also decided to stay in the dorm room and check on DP periodically as well.
During the course of the case, the defense tried to argue that they had no duty to figure out if DP was unconscious, as they were not medical providers. We advised the defense that we would ask the jury why, if DP was okay and was just drunk as the defense contended, why did the roommate stay with him to keep an eye on him. Similarly, why did the security guard feel the need to check on him intermittently? Our answer: Because they were worried that he might die.
So, although DP’s roommate said that he would stay in the room with him, after about an hour or so, his roommate decides that he wants to go down the hall to the computer lab to play video games.
The security guard had already come up one time to check on DP, and he later testified that when he came up to check on him, DP was still okay.
Meanwhile, DP’s roommate has left the room. The security guard comes up to the room a second time to check on DP. This time, DP is not breathing. That's when ‘all hell breaks loose’.
The security guard calls 911 and starts administering CPR. He administers CPR for quite some time but gets no response. Police officers soon after arrive at the dorm and grab a defibrillator (AED) from the hallway, but they cannot revive DP. The paramedics show up minutes later and pronounce DP dead, shortly after 2 AM.
When DP’s mom came to us, we knew we had a challenge. The autopsy done by the Miami-Dade County medical examiner showed that DP’s blood alcohol level was .367-- about 4 1/2 times the legal limit to drive a vehicle.
Under then existing Florida law, if a jury finds DP more than 50% at fault for his own death as a result of being under the influence of alcohol or drugs, then the family gets nothing.
Our office simulated the case for one whole day with three different mock jury panels a few months after we started working on the case. One panel came back with a finding of no fault on the part of the school and security company defendants, and two panels came back with 70% fault on DP. On top of that, the two verdicts that found some negligence for the school and security company were for low dollar amounts. We knew that we had an uphill battle to convince a real trial jury that DP was less than 51% at fault, and to persuade them to award fair and reasonable compensation for the family.
We sued the school and the security company in Miami-Dade County. We spent about 3 1/2 years litigating the case and fighting to obtain extensive discovery from the defendants. During the course of the approximate 40 depositions that we took, we found out that neither the school nor the security company trained their students, RAs, or security guards to recognize the difference between a person who is drunk and a person who is suffering with acute alcohol poisoning. In other words, the defendants failed to train their RAs and security guards on how to tell the difference between a person who is intoxicated and just needs to sober up, versus a person who is dangerously intoxicated, unconscious, and unable to be roused and whose life is potentially in danger.
Once again, it was a ‘mixed bag’ on that issue because, despite the school and security company’s negligence, we still had the problem of a jury potentially finding DP greater than 50% at fault for drinking himself to death. However, through the almost 4 years of discovery, we were able to obtain a significant amount of testimony that we felt would be very helpful toward keeping DP’s fault below 50%. One of the owners of the security company was obnoxious and also apathetic regarding the circumstances of this case. He just simply seemed to not care about what happened. He basically said that his security company had no duty to protect the students who overdrank, even if the students were on campus and their severely intoxicated condition was known to the security guards.
Although the school was supposedly a dry campus, one of the security guards testified that the students on campus would frequently have something that they called "let-outs.” At these let-outs, which typically occurred outside the students’ dorm building, everybody would be drinking out in the open and carrying around plastic red cups filled with alcohol. The security guards knew about the let-outs and what was in those plastic red cups, but they failed to do anything about it. One security guard testified about drinking on campus and even said of the students: “They drunk every day.”
In the course of our representation, we hired several expert witnesses, including two Harvard professors who were also emergency room physicians. One of the professors testified that he had been practicing in the Boston area (where there are numerous colleges and universities) for about 40 years. He testified that he probably had seen in the emergency room around 1,000 students who were acutely intoxicated, all either college students or college-aged. He could not remember one person in those 40 years who did not make it out of the emergency room alive; not a single one of those young persons died of acute alcohol intoxication.
The other Harvard emergency room doctor we retained was a Board Certified Medical Toxicologist. He testified that despite DP’s blood-alcohol level, there was a 99% chance that he would have survived had somebody timely brought him to the emergency room. There was a local emergency room within no more than 20 minutes from the school.
After almost 4 years of litigation, we settled with the school for $1.75 million. Then we continued to litigate against the security company, and about three weeks before trial, which had been specially set to take place over 10 days in February, the security company capitulated and agreed to settle for an additional $2 million. Thus, the total settlement was $3.75 million.
DP’s parents, along with everybody in our office, hope that this case gets wider publicity so that colleges and universities across the country can understand the need to provide a safe environment for young people who overdrink and are in danger on campus as a result.
RAs, security guards, and other persons who are responsible for the well-being of students on college campuses need to understand the difference between a drunk student and a student at risk of dying from alcohol poisoning. There's a big difference between those things, and recognizing that difference can save a life.
Alcohol poisoning occurs when someone has drunk so much alcohol that their brain begins to shut down, which then causes that person’s lungs and heart to stop functioning.
Binge drinking, like what DP did that night (and like thousands of college students do every year), creates a higher risk of alcohol poisoning because large amounts of alcohol are consumed in such a short period of time that the body cannot keep up and metabolize it fast enough.
We think one reason that the RA and fellow students and the security guard brought him upstairs to his room is that they were probably trying to protect DP from getting in trouble for drinking. The R.A. was supposed to report that type of instance, an intoxicated student on campus, to the school authorities. The security company was not so quick to admit that they had the same obligation. So these people who helped him upstairs probably didn’t want to report to the ‘powers that be’ what had gone down. And the defense wanted to put the friend who drove him back to the dorm and carried him upstairs, on the verdict form as a Fabre defendant in order to place less fault on themselves.
We hope by reporting this case that colleges and universities (and the security companies that are hired to protect the students on school campuses) will get the message that their employees must be trained on how to deal with severely intoxicated students. Binge drinking amongst college students is highly common, and it is entirely foreseeable that this binge drinking can result in dire consequences for young students. School and security company employees have to be trained on the very basic differences between somebody who's just drunk, and somebody who's suffering from alcohol poisoning and is potentially on death's door. Had the school and security company employees been trained to do so in this instance, DP would still be alive today.