NC Supreme Court Rules Sovereign Immunity Cannot Shield NCSU Employees in Wrongful Death Suit Over Campus Chiller Accident

On January 20, 2017, Melvin Joseph Long was performing routine maintenance on a trailer-mounted chiller at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. His task was to loosen metal flanges capping water pipes. What he did not know was that the pipes still held pressurized refrigerant gas. Months earlier, in December 2016, NCSU employees had drained the chiller without replacing the antifreeze, leaving residual water inside. That water froze. The trapped pressure had nowhere to go.

When Long attempted to loosen a flange, it blew off the pipe with violent force and struck him in the face. He died five days later, on January 25, 2017. His wife, Marla Hudson Long, brought a wrongful death action on behalf of his estate against six NCSU employees in their individual capacities.

Defense attorneys moved to dismiss on sovereign immunity grounds, arguing that because the defendants were state employees acting within the scope of their employment, the state's immunity extended to them personally. The trial court and Court of Appeals agreed. The estate appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court.

John Paul Godwin of Hardison and Cochran, along with co-counsel Sanford Thompson IV, argued that sovereign immunity is a protection of the state itself, not a personal shield for the individuals who carry out state functions. In a 4-3 decision issued August 13, 2021, the Supreme Court agreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Anita Earls held that individual-capacity claims against state employees belong in superior court and fall outside the reach of sovereign immunity, even when the state elects to provide those employees with a defense. The court declined to read the relevant statutes in a way that would create 'serious notice problems for plaintiffs.'

The ruling was a significant procedural win: it kept the lawsuit alive and established that North Carolina workers and their families can sue state employees personally for on-the-job negligence without first navigating the State Tort Claims Act. On remand, however, the defendants moved for summary judgment on the merits. In August 2024, the Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court's grant of that motion, finding that the defendants' failure to use antifreeze was not a reasonably foreseeable cause of the fatal pressure buildup and that Long bore some contributory negligence. The estate appealed once more, and on October 17, 2025, the North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the summary judgment, holding that the fatal sequence of events was unforeseeable as a matter of law. The estate did not recover damages.