Wrongful Death Suit Filed Against University Of Delaware
Laura Shanks wasn’t provided with a moderate degree of protection according to a lawsuit filed by the developing woman’s grief - stricken parents, Jeff and Claire Shanks of Yardley, Pennsylvania. The 20 - juncture - old’s death, which occurred at the rise of 2006 Fall Semester, from a fatal combination of cocaine and the painkiller Fentanyl, was as much a backwash of negligence as it was a wrongful death.
According to the suit, the university’s “completely inadequate and substandard security system” allowed an expelled student, Kevin Hamilton, to return to campus in the early morning hours of August 28, 2006, and enter Shanks’ Harrington A room with the drug - laced substance in his possession. Both vernal adults took the deadly cocktail, which led to Ms. Shanks’ termination.
Hamilton was Shanks’s former fiancee who’d been expelled and banned from campus in 2005 after police commence 53. 4 grams of marijuana in his Rodney Hall room. On the nighttime of Shanks’ death, he brought drugs to her room despite the no trespassing prohibition he was under the auspices of. But the Shanks family had been unaware of any issues with the institution’s security system. In actuality, when Laura was quiet in high school and investigating the school, the university’s website had touted the buoyancy fashion as “nationally famed. ” In codicil to these willful misrepresentations, the complaints filed by the low Shanks faulted the existent - less keycard form as the unitary form of apartment hall endurance. Daydream resources in human structure at the University of Delaware were sorely pressed at the present of the preventable tragedy. According to 2005 figures, for any habituated hour during a 24 - hour day, only a dozen security and police officers were available to watch 968 acres of land with 343 university buildings.
Wrongful death suits have become increasingly common in the United States in recent agedness. Thousands of deaths attributed to sundry forms of accidents, maltreat, or negligence are eligible for the dubious set.
