Editor’s note: This article is by Bob Audette of the Brattleboro Reformer, in which it was first published Sept. 30, 2014.
BRATTLEBORO — A lawsuit filed by the family of a St. Johnsbury man who was severely beaten in 2011 by a former Brattleboro Retreat patient was dismissed in late August by a Windham County Superior Court judge.
The family of Michael Kuligoski had filed suit against the Retreat and Northeast Kingdom Human Services for injuries sustained after Evan Rapoza, attacked and beat Kuligoski with a wrench in March 2011.
Kuligoski, a furnace technician, was working at a property owned by the Rapoza family. Because of his injuries, Kuligoski requires constant medical attention, according to the complaint filed by the family. Rapoza was found to be insane at the time of the attack and criminal charges were eventually dismissed.
Before the attack, Rapoza was diagnosed with schizophrenia and in 2010 he spent nearly two months at the Retreat. After he was discharged
from the Retreat, his treatment plan was turned over to Northeast Kingdom Human Services, where he was prescribed antipsychotic and
anti-anxiety medications.
According to a story in VTDigger, Rapoza’s mother told Northeast Kingdom Human Services staff that her son stopped taking his medication again in
December 2010. Nobody from the organization reached out to Rapoza between then and March when the attack on Kuligoski took place, according to the complaint.
In late 2012, Rapoza returned to the Brattleboro Retreat and in December of that year he was released to a halfway house in Brattleboro. A court later ruled the Vermont Department of Mental Health improperly released him from the Retreat and in August 2013 he was moved from the Meadowview Recovery Residence in Brattleboro to the newly opened Middlesex Therapeutic Community Residence.
Ritchie E. Berger, of Dinse Knapp McAndrew, who represented the Retreat, said Judge John Wesley found that as a matter of law, neither
the Retreat nor Northeast Kingdom Human Services had a legal duty to Kuligoski or his family.
“He applied a very long-standing Vermont Supreme Court precedent in his decision,” said Berger. “Nonetheless, the people at the Retreat
feel terribly for the family of Michael Kuligoski.
But they also believed, as Wesley concluded, that under Vermont law they weren’t a proper party to be sued. Nonetheless, their heart goes out to the Kuligoski family. This was truly a terrible and tragic incident.”
Richard Cassidy, of Hoff Curtis, told the Reformer that the Kuligoski family asked him to appeal Wesley’s decision to the Vermont Supreme Court.
“I’m not surprised by the judge’s decision,” said Cassidy. “No Vermont Supreme Court decision goes as far as we asked this court to go,
although I think he could have elected to do that.”
Cassidy said he hopes the Supreme Court will address the underlying question of whether a therapist or facility has a duty to attend to the public and its interest in public safety when making decisions such as those related to Rapoza.
“This is a critically important issue, because the mental health care system in Vermont is broken,” he said.
In the motion to dismiss, Retreat attorneys contended making mental health providers liable for patients harming “anyone in the world,”
even if its “days, weeks or even years after discharge,” was unreasonable.
According to the Vermont Supreme Court, therapists and mental health facilities have a duty to warn when a patient makes a threat against an identifiable victim. However, the court noted, there is generally no duty to control the conduct of another person to prevent harm to a
third party. While a therapist has a duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent harm to third parties, that duty to warn arises only when
triggered by risk of danger to an identifiable victim, noted Wesley.
“It is undisputed that Plaintiff Kuligoski was not an identifiable victim considering any information known or knowable by either the Retreat or Northeast Kingdom,” wrote Wesley. “Neither the Brattleboro Retreat nor Northeast Kingdom had a duty to warn the public at large of the risks posed by (Evan Rapoza).”
Wesley noted that the relief the Kuligoski family was requesting “should not fall to a trial court to predict, that under the circumstances here, the Vermont Supreme Court re-balance the limits (precedent) established …”
Expanding the net of precedent, noted Wesley, “would appear particularly doubtful here, since even assuming (Evan Rapoza’s) family had been warned of his potential for violent decompensation, it is entirely speculative that such warning would have prevented the encounter between (Evan Rapoza) and Plaintiff Kuligoski.”
And while a therapist or facility might bear responsibility when they know of an imminent threat to a defined group of people, wrote Wesley, neither the Retreat nor Northeast Kingdom could predict “when or under what circumstances (Evan Rapoza) would become generally dangerous, and the foreseeability of his particular danger to Michael Kuligoski was
non-existent. … The claim that Defendants could have exercised reasonable care that would have prevented an eventual injury to an unknown person months after (Rapoza) terminated treatment, stretches the concept of common-law duty to act reasonably to prevent harm …”
A lawsuit filed by the Kuligoski family against the Rapoza family is “in the early stage of pre-trial development,” according to court documents.
Bob Audette can be reached at raudette@reformer.com, or at
802-254-2311, ext. 160. Follow Bob on Twitter @audette.reformer.
VTDigger and The Caledonian Record contributed to this report.
