Wrongful Death Suit Filed Against University Of Delaware
Laura Shanks wasn’t provided with a impartial degree of protection according to a lawsuit filed by the young woman’s grief - stricken parents, Jeff and Claire Shanks of Yardley, Pennsylvania. The 20 - continuance - old’s death, which occurred at the origin of 2006 Fall Semester, from a fatal mix of cocaine and the painkiller Fentanyl, was as much a event 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 crude adults took the deadly cocktail, which led to Ms. Shanks’ ending.
Hamilton was Shanks’s former sweetheart who’d been expelled and banned from campus in 2005 after police fix 53. 4 grams of marijuana in his Rodney Foyer room. On the dark hours 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 detail, when Laura was in order in high school and investigating the school, the university’s website had touted the faith anatomy as “nationally renowned. ” In codicil to these willful misrepresentations, the complaints filed by the downcast Shanks faulted the creature - less keycard plan as the especial construction of edifice lobby rosiness. Sanguineness resources in human profile at the University of Delaware were sorely pressed at the stage of the preventable tragedy. According to 2005 figures, for any apt hour during a 24 - hour day, only a dozen security and police officers were available to vigil 968 acres of land with 343 university buildings.
Wrongful death suits have become increasingly common in the United States in recent oldness. Thousands of deaths attributed to sundry forms of accidents, maul, or negligence are eligible for the dubious club.
