Can you sue adult care for someone on disability who was abused?
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Can you sue adult care for someone on disability who was abused?
My brother is an adult with a disability. He lives in a group home. He’s goes to some kind of school during the day. He came home with his arms swollen. He was taken to the hospital and they said he fractured it. They bandage it and sent home. He arm got more swollen and the group home took him to another hospital. They said that he needed to have an emergency surgery to save his arm. He got during the school and they never said anything or reach out. The police are going to investigate it.
Asked on September 2, 2017 under Personal Injury, Florida
Answers:
SJZ, Member, New York Bar / FreeAdvice Contributing Attorney
Answered 6 years ago | Contributor
You can sue IF you can show that they were at fault in some way: for example, that one of their staff injured him; that were not supervising their charges, and one of the other people under their care was able to take advantage of the lack of supervision and attack him; that his injury was obvious while at the school and they failed to notice it or seek care, leading to it getting worse.
On the other hand, if they were not at fault--for example, they are supervising the people in their care well, but your brother happened to get injured despite the school doing everything reasonably expected of them--they would not be liable. Liability depends on fault.
So you need to know more about what happened and how; then you can decide what needs to be done.
Also: if your brother is (as we assume) mentally incompetent, whoever is his legal guardian would be the one who would have to bring legal action on behalf. If that's you, you can do this; otherwise, you need the actual legal guardian to act.
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