$4.25 Million Settles a Nursing Home Resident's Fatal Series of Falls in North Carolina

An older woman entered a North Carolina nursing home expecting routine care, and she lived there for roughly two months. Toward the end of that stay, she suffered a series of falls inside the facility. The falls left her with a serious head injury along with other injuries to her body.

She was taken for treatment, but she did not recover. She later died, and her family contended that the fall-related injuries were what killed her. Because the settlement is confidential, her name, the facility, and the county where the case was filed were never made public.

The family hired Henson & Fuerst in Raleigh, where Rachel A. Fuerst, Thomas Henson Jr., Carma Henson, and Jordan Godwin worked the case alongside Rebecca Britton of Britton Law in Fayetteville. The complaint did not stop at ordinary negligence. It named the corporate nursing-home operators and added claims of administrative and corporate negligence, together with a request for punitive damages, a claim reserved for conduct a jury could find went beyond a single careless mistake.

Falls are among the most common and most preventable harms in long-term care, since a facility that records a resident's fall risk can adjust how closely it watches her. To support the corporate and punitive claims, the plaintiffs had to connect a short admission marked by repeated falls to decisions made by the companies that ran the home, not only to the aides at the bedside.

The legal team filed suit and moved the case through discovery, taking depositions to document how a resident with a known fall risk came to fall repeatedly over a short admission. The parties later sat for a mediated settlement conference. No agreement closed the matter at that point, and the case was placed on track for trial.

With trial pending, the nursing-home companies agreed to pay $4.25 million to resolve the claims. North Carolina Lawyers Weekly reported the settlement in May 2023. Because the case ended by agreement rather than a jury verdict, there was no award to appeal and no figure later reduced by a court. The terms kept the defendants' identities and the location of the case confidential.