## Facts

- Vernon “Joel” Burnette received pain-management care at PainCARE, P.A., including lumbar epidural steroid injections administered by Dr. Kimber L. Eubanks in 2009 through an infected lump on his back.
- Joel developed bacterial meningitis and later arachnoiditis, causing severe, chronic pain.
- Joel sued for medical negligence against Eubanks, PainCARE, and another physician.
- In 2013, Joel died by suicide, leaving a note attributing his decision to intolerable pain.
- Joel’s parents continued his pending negligence (survival) claim as estate representatives and added a wrongful death claim alleging the negligent treatment and resulting pain proximately caused the suicide.
- At trial, the parents presented evidence of Joel’s close relationship and frequent interactions with them; counsel urged the jury to value “loss of attention, care, and loss of a complete family” as economic loss by converting expected future family interaction into a monetary rate over the parents’ lifetimes.
- Jury instructions treated “loss of attention, care, and loss of a complete family” as economic damages in the wrongful death claim and separately described noneconomic damages as non-calculable, to be awarded in a fair and just amount.
- The jury awarded wrongful death damages of approximately $820,062, including $550,000 labeled as economic damages for the stated “loss” items, and also awarded substantial survival damages (later reduced by statutory caps).

## Issues

1. Whether the causation instructions improperly allowed liability without requiring defendants’ negligence to be a but-for cause of Joel’s suicide.
2. Whether expert testimony was sufficient to prove defendants’ negligent treatment proximately caused Joel’s suicide.
3. Whether the $550,000 wrongful death award labeled as “economic damages” for “loss of attention, care, and loss of a complete family” was supported by evidence of pecuniary loss capable of market valuation.

## Decision

- The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed the liability and causation verdicts.
- The court held the causation instructions, considered as a whole, adequately stated proximate cause and did not dilute the but-for requirement.
- The court held the expert testimony sufficiently supported a causal chain from negligent injection to infection-related conditions, to chronic pain, to suicide.
- The court reversed and vacated the $550,000 wrongful death “economic damages” component because the proof did not establish these losses as economic rather than noneconomic.
- The case was remanded for further proceedings consistent with the damages analysis.

## Legal Principles

- Proximate cause requires an injury to result in a natural and continuous sequence from the wrongful act, unbroken by a superseding cause, and to be a necessary cause of the injury.
- An event can have multiple but-for causes; describing conduct as “contributing to” an injury does not necessarily reduce the plaintiff’s causation burden when proximate cause is properly defined.
- In wrongful death actions, economic damages must be supported by evidence that the claimed loss is pecuniary and can be valued by expert testimony or by common-sense market valuation of a service or item.
- Intangible relational losses (e.g., companionship, society, emotional support) are noneconomic; they cannot be converted into “economic” damages through generalized time-and-rate calculations without a concrete market basis.

## Conclusion

The court sustained the jury’s findings that negligent medical treatment leading to extreme chronic pain could proximately cause a later suicide, but it set aside a large wrongful-death “economic” award because the claimed losses reflected noneconomic relational harm without evidence of objective, market-based value.


Burnette v. Eubanks, 425 P.3d 343 (Kan. 2018)