Sigma Nu chapter at Alabama sued over knife injuries..
 

For more information, please read the link:

http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_109623.asp

i thought i remembered this happening at bama, not uab. i am truly sorry to learn that the young man did not make a full recovery.

Hmmm...the article states University of Alabama, which is usually UAB. If I have the school wrong, please let me know and I will edit my post. Thanks.

I looked up the UAB website and they do not list a chapter of Sigma Nu there. I will edit my first posting.

UAB usually means University of Alabama Birmingham.
UA is Bama.

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060913/NEWS/609130323/1007/NEWS02

It says he was a member of the fraternity.... At this chapter, and was working to remove the assaulter from the party. Nice job by the lawyer to find some extra people to sue. (I bet Theta chapter settles)

I feel bad for this kid, and I hope the guy that actually assaulted him pays dearly for such a stupid action.
On an extremely selfish note; I sure hope they don't shut down Theta chapter over this (our Nationals has been a bit trigger happy lately)

The articles says nothing about UAB. It's University of Alabama all the way.

What I see there is a different version of the facts than I've heard before. My understanding was that the injured party was volunteering to help out with security. He was a former candidate or something. It's also interesting because the stabbing happened outside of fraternity property and was perpetrated by someone who the injured party was helping to kick out because they weren't on the guest list.

At any rate, this is why we have guest lists at parties. It's bad news for everyone involved.

http://media.www.cw.ua.edu/media/sto...-2867155.shtml

Witness Testimony:
http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_58233.asp

It's not that I actually want or expect the fraternity to lose the case, but I imagine that the family is hoping to get enough money to care for their brain damaged son, rather than looking for anything punitive or having a personal-injury-suit-as-lottery-ticket mentality.

If it is true that he is as disabled as the stories present, the family confronts a real problem, especially upon the death of his parents. If the guy can't live independently, what will they do?

It would seem to me that the fraternity probably does have insurance, but that the family is going to have to prove that the fraternity is responsible, and I think it might be pretty hard.

If you don't have it already, all of us should probably look into long term disability insurance. We don't think we're going to need it, but I bet if this guy had it, there'd be no suit.

I wonder how expensive it would be for a national group to offer it to members?

What I think is sad is that I would think this lawsuit will stop any goodwill fundraising for the victim. And that is a shame; he may have gotten that longterm care w/out the lawyer. We'll see.

Set up a trust for the kid's benefit. When that runs out, medicaid takes over.

I agree. I don't see how the fraternity as an organization has a duty to protect a non-active member (as I think the victim was) from being stabbed by someone the victim and the fraternity had evicted from a party earlier that evening. I just don't see how the victim had the sort of relationship with the chapter which gives rise to such an assumption of liability. My feeling is that if the chapter wanted to settle, that would have already happened. The victim's suit as to the fraternity look very weak.

It's really too bad what happened to this kid. It's too bad that the attacker is probably judgment proof. That doesn't mean that the victim can sue everyone in sight (and win).

Disability insurance is important if you have a lot of assets. Otherwise, there's Medicaid/Social Security.

The victim was a non-member. If the national organizations thought they could make some money selling this sort of insurance, they'd probably be in that business.

ETA: this was to Banditone, but I didn't think to quote.


Of course I don't know, but I'd think he could get a lot more money from the suit if he wins than they would have been looking at in fundraisers.

Had the chapter or GLO already had fundraisers for the guy? If so, you may be on to something. If not, it's hard to figure out why the family should have thought they would start.

(I know it's all probably very weird because the fraternity may have been advised right from the start to not do anything that made it look like they thought they were responsible. But if they didn't reach out to the family, then it's pretty easy to figure out why the family decided to sue the people most likely to have money, rather than the guy most responsible who probably doesn't have anything to collect.)

Several of the articles say he was a member, but you'd know more than I since it's your group.

The family has to have the money for a trust to set one up. Maybe they do; I don't know.

But I know I'd sure want my family better taken care of than by what Medicaid would cover, and I think it's silly to think that for most college graduates that Medicaid/social security is going to come close to paying you what you are used to living on.

If you are fully disabled, by the very definition, you can't work anymore. The medical bills are only part of the financial problem.

It also surprised me based on your previous posts that you support relying on the state rather than accepting personal responsibility for buying disability insurance as the way to go.

ETA: my suggestion about the GLO offering disability insurance was not so they could profit from it simply by selling it. But if all members of the group had it, there'd be a whole lot less reason to sue the group if you were injured at a group event. And again, some stories are saying he was a member.

Most of them describe him as a former member. I don't know what that really means. Did he resign? Did he pledge but never get initiated?

All the stories note that they are suing for punitive damages as well.

I remember hearing about this the night it happened. Pretty terrible story. I wonder what happened to the person who stabbed him.

Edit: see that he pled guilty to 1st degree assault.

He pled guilty to first degree assault and is also being sued.

But, and I'm making some rather un-PC assumptions here, I'm willing to bet that adult non-students who crash fraternity parties where they know no one to steal beer and who also end up stabbing somebody, generally don't have the net worth to even pay for a 1/2 day at the Shepard Center.

ETA: I didn't see that you already added.

Probably a safe assumption.

I haven't done anything to check on this kid's membership status and I don't imagine I will. As a "former member," I imagine that either the newspaper writer didn't understand the fact that an alumnus is a current member.. even a dead person is a current member, so if the newspaper got the kid's status right, he's either a pledge who didn't make it or someone who was booted for disciplinary reasons.

Me neither. I hope their PI lawyer is doing double duty setting up a guardianship or whatever needs to be done. I seriously have to question their lawyer's competence since he first brought suit in federal court based on diversity without complete diversity of the parties... that's 1st semester civil procedure.

So would I.. it's just that people who aren't legally at fault ought not be accountable for this. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.

Not if you're a ward of the state. I imagine the victim here is going to be fully disabled. I know disabled children of families with SERIOUS money who are living off of Medicaid/state benefits because those kids themselves are fully disabled.

You haven't read my previous posts then. The state, in my opinion, has a duty to provide for those who are physically or mentally unable to provide for themselves. That makes pretty good sense.. In effect, the Medicaid tax taken out of our paychecks is disability insurance.

Of course there'd be. Disability insurance is not liability insurance. In fact, if a person were covered by such insurance, the insurance company would probably bring suit against the fraternity if there were any hope of getting some money for the fraternity's liability.

Maybe against the attacker. Against the fraternity? That's a laugh. I don't know much about Alabama law, but when liability is itself in question, any basis for punitive damages is going to probably be pretty specious. Most states have statutes which limit the heck out of liability damages -- especially in the south. It's very early in this suit. Based on what I've read so far, the part of the suit pertaining to the fraternity ought to be tossed out. As I've said before, if that was not the case, there'd probably already be a settlement.

Most of the problem today is everyone is sue happy!:o

Sue everyone and let it fall where it may fall.

If a few haze in a Chapter, then it concerns every member even though those who may have not known anything!:o

Tom, I don't think so. The lawyers are going to go anywhere they plausibly think they have a shot where it comes to getting money for their clients. The clients are going to do what the lawyers advise (generally). If the lawyer doesn't sue someone without getting permission not to sue from the client, or at least limiting the scope of their services, that lawyer might be liable to the client in malpractice.

To say everyone is "sue happy" is simply an uninformed position to take in this case.

I've only read the article in the Chattanooga newspaper, but in there it said that the victim originally filed the lawsuit against the Fraternity in Alabama, "But the Federal Court there dismissed the fraternity on grounds that both it and Mr. Wilder were Tennessee residents. " (quoted from the newspaper).

Sigma Nu Fraternity isn't a resident of Tennessee. They are HQ in Lexington, VA. So if the Fraternity got dismissed from the lawsuit because they weren't "residents" of Alabama, then wouldn't they get dismissed from the lawsuit in Tennessee for the same reason?

PsychTau

Diversity can be tricky. I'm really not sure what the basis for dismissal on diversity was. I found where the case was brought in the Northern District of Alabama Federal Court. I could research the issue, but there are some far better civ pro experts than I on this board.

Kevin,

I feel different than you do about Medicaid. As a program I see it as kind of like Social Security for retirement. You pay in and you are entitled to take out, but it's still not a good idea to set yourself up to be dependent only on it if you have other options. And many of us have a chance to purchase insurance that would provide a different and I think better level of care if it turns out we need it.

I don't look down on people who have to use it as their only source of health care and income; I just don't think most of us want to be among them.

I understand the difference between liability insurance and disability insurance, but because individuals can't usually get liability insurance to pay ourselves when we get hurt doing stupid things we elected to do, at least as far as I know; medical insurance and disability insurance combined are probably the next best thing.

And it might be worthwhile for groups to try to offer it. (Although the more I think about it, the more I'm not sure an exclusively college guy pool is probably that a good risk group.) Here's why:

I think sometimes people ARE capable of recognizing if they can take care of themselves, that some bad things happen, and no one is particularly at fault or should pay.

Think about car wrecks. How many people do you know who after having a wreck for which they were partially responsible would insist on suing the other driver if their own insurance company paid for their expenses related to the wreck (and their own insurance company didn't insist on suing to recover some damages)? Sure there'd be some jackasses that would want to sue just to see what they could get, but there's still a number of people who don't operate that way; they think, "my hospital bill is paid and my car is fixed. It's over."

And although I'm not that optimistic about human nature generally, I think the number of people who would try to sue the party with deep pockets who really has very little/no true liability for the bad outcome in other cases might go down if fewer people didn't actually need the money to continue life with a better standard of living than Medicare can provide.*

As I said before, I don't think the family in this case can really expect to collect from the fraternity, nor do I really think they should be able to if things are in fact as the fraternity claims. (I'm interested to know how much not having the required security guards matters if part of the problem was a lack of security. Would the victim even have interacted with the attacker had there been paid security guards? Does violating a university rule actual make them somehow legally liable?)

It's a shame that this guy might be out of luck with the quality of care he receives, but I don't think it makes Sigma Nu obligated to pay for it.

I was thinking more about the former member status too. If he wants to sue the group like this, can he do it as a member of the group? Could he have resigned membership because of the suit?

*I'm not sure about this, but isn't this some of the logic of requiring kids to have health insurance to play school sports? Even though we can make your mom sign waivers of liability to play, we also know that she's going to be less likely to sue if someone else is going to pay to have your broken leg fixed?

Sorry for the double post especially after the length of that one.

Here's the thing: I don't know if the family would being suing Sigma Nu if the victim had died.

They might be the kind of folks who'd be so deranged by grief that they go back over every aspect of what happened looking for things that could have gone differently and trying to punish people for them.

On the other hand, they might recognize that their son was stabbed by a particular person in a fight when he tried of his own free will to get that person to leave a party. I think in that case, they would have pushed the criminal prosecution of the attacker and left it at that.

But because the son instead survived with brain damage and they know he will need care for the rest of his life, they have a much bigger reason to think suing the group is what they need to do.

Like I said, it's probably the lawyer's advice they're acting on as far as suing the fraternity. Most PI lawyers are in it for the quick settlement with the deepest pockets so that the can collect their contingency fee and get out. In this case, it appears that the fraternity's insurance company is not going to settle the case.

The current status of the case is that the plaintiff sued in Federal Court in the Northern District of Alabama. The suit was dismissed for lack of diversity. The claim is now pending in Tennessee state court.

As for insurance and fraternities, like I said, if the guy had disability insurance, in all likelihood, if the disability insurance company thought they had a meritorious claim, they'd sue the fraternity anyhow.

As far as your beliefs on Medicaid, it's a subject we could discuss in the news an politics forum. As I've explained, had this kid been covered by disability insurance, there's a strong likelihood that the disability insurer would be bringing suit anyhow.

I think that insurance companies are less likely to file weak cases than PI attorneys are, but maybe I'm wrong. And although I don't really have any more to say about it, if the point I'm trying to make is that offering disability insurance would decrease risk, this seems like as good a place as any. You're actually the one who brought up Medicaid.