Trial News

A Massachusetts appellate court has held that sovereign immunity is unavailable to the Boston Public Health Commission when its emergency medical technicians (EMTs) failed to restrain a suicidal woman while transporting her to the hospital, allowing her to run out of the ambulance and into traffic. Massachusetts law provides an exception to sovereign immunity when public employees place a victim in a worse position than they found her, and the plaintiff alleged that the EMTs had done just that. The decision confirms the limits of sovereign immunity in Massachusetts when a public employee has placed the injured party in danger. (Williams v. Boston Pub. Health Comm’n, 2019 WL 4024833 (Mass. App. Ct. Aug. 27, 2019).)

Anneke Williams was at Pine Street Inn, a Boston homeless shelter, when she began experiencing suicidal thoughts. Shelter staff called 911, and a Boston Public Health Commission ambulance company, Boston EMS, responded to the call. Boston EMS transported Williams to a hospital for treatment but failed to restrain her during transport or secure a police escort, as is standard practice when the company transports suicidal patients. When an EMT opened the ambulance door after arriving at the hospital, Williams ran into the street and was struck by a car. Williams died of her injuries.

Williams’s mother, Gail Williams, sued the Boston Public Health Commission in Massachusetts state court in January 2017, alleging wrongful death and failure to supervise and train its EMTs. The trial court dismissed both causes of action for failure to state a claim in July 2017, and the plaintiff appealed.

Reviewing de novo, the appellate court examined whether given the Massachusetts Tort Claims Act’s sovereign immunity provisions the plaintiff had alleged facts that “plausibly suggest an entitlement to relief.” Massachusetts Gen. Laws Ch. 258, §10(j), generally shields public employees from claims based on their “act or failure to act to prevent or diminish the harmful consequences of a condition or situation, including the violent or tortious conduct of a third person.” However, §10(j)(2) provides an exception to this liability shield for claims based on “the intervention of a public employee which causes injury to the victim or places the victim in a worse position than he was in before the intervention.”

The commission argued that the EMTs’ failure to protect Williams was an omission, not an affirmative intervention covered under the sovereign immunity exception in §10(j)(2). The appellate court agreed that the failure to train and supervise the EMTs was an omission and affirmed the trial court’s dismissal of this claim. However, it found that the removal of Williams from Pine Street Inn and the transportation of her to the hospital was “an affirmative act of the part of the intervener,” and thus the wrongful death claim was subject to the sovereign immunity exception. Pine Street Inn staff had been looking out for Williams and attempting to secure help for her, but in transporting Williams to the hospital, the EMTs allegedly “brought her to a place where nobody was willing or able to prevent her from killing herself.”

In addition, although a third party’s car hit Williams, the appellate court found that the plaintiff had sufficiently alleged that this third-party act “ought to have been foreseen” by the EMTs and therefore did not excuse their negligent transport of Williams. The risk of injury to Williams in these circumstances is a question of fact for a jury to decide, the court said, finding the plaintiff’s allegations sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss.

Randolph, Mass., attorney John J. Hightower called the decision “practical” and said it would “allow public entities to be held liable for the conduct of their agents” in cases such as Williams’s. The decision “clarifies the fine line that public entities cannot cross in terms of maintaining sovereign immunity,” he added, noting that Williams’s case was one of “clear cut liability.”