## Facts

- Lawrence Banks resided at a New Orleans nursing home operated by Maison Orleans II, Inc.
- Around 4:30 a.m. on February 16, 1993, fellow resident Joseph Harris attacked Banks with a steel pipe taken from a maintenance area while Banks waited outside his apartment for a newspaper.
- Harris suffered from organic brain syndrome and required supervision; facility personnel described his status as “24-hour supervision,” implemented as checks roughly every two hours.
- A nursing assistant saw Harris holding the steel pipe shortly before the attack, asked him to surrender it, and took no immediate steps to secure the pipe or obtain help to disarm him.
- During the attack, aides assigned near the nursing station were asleep; a worker from another part of the building responded first after a phlebotomist witnessed the beating and screamed.
- Banks sustained serious head and facial injuries requiring surgery and prolonged hospitalization; he died of a heart attack about two months later.
- Banks’s family sued Maison Orleans and its insurer for negligence and for survival and wrongful-death damages.
- A jury awarded $854,729 in total; the trial court directed a verdict for defendants on wrongful-death claims but allowed the survival claim to proceed to judgment.

## Issues

1. Whether the nursing home breached its duty of reasonable care to supervise and protect residents by failing to control Harris and failing to secure access to dangerous instrumentalities.
2. Whether any breach was a legal cause of Banks’s traumatic injuries and whether the assault and its aftermath could be found to have contributed to Banks’s subsequent heart attack and death.
3. Whether the trial court erred in granting a directed verdict dismissing the wrongful-death claims.
4. Whether the survival damages were excessive and required modification.

## Decision

- The court reversed in part, amended in part, and affirmed as amended.
- It upheld the negligence finding supporting recovery in the survival action, concluding the record supported breach and causation for Banks’s injuries.
- It reversed the directed verdict on wrongful-death claims, holding the evidence was sufficient for reasonable jurors to decide whether the assault contributed to or accelerated Banks’s death.
- It amended the damages by reducing and/or reallocating certain components, and otherwise affirmed the judgment as amended.

## Legal Principles

- A nursing home owes residents a duty of reasonable care in supervision and protection, taking account of residents’ vulnerabilities and the facility’s custodial role.
- Foreseeability may be found where cognitively impaired residents require supervision and the facility’s security and monitoring are inadequate; lack of prior violent history does not, by itself, eliminate the duty to supervise.
- A third party’s intentional act does not necessarily break causation when the risk of such harm is increased by deficient supervision and access to a dangerous object.
- A directed verdict is improper when medical and circumstantial evidence permits reasonable jurors to find that trauma and resulting decline materially contributed to or hastened death.
- Appellate review defers to a factfinder’s reasonable credibility choices under the manifest error/clearly wrong standard, while allowing modification of damages outside a reasonable range.

## Conclusion

The appellate court held the nursing home liable for negligent supervision and security that enabled a resident-on-resident assault, reinstated wrongful-death claims because causation evidence was jury-eligible, and modified damages while otherwise affirming the judgment.


Riley v. Maison Orleans II, Inc., 829 So. 2d 479 (La. Ct. App. 4th Cir. 2002)