Wrongful Death Suit Filed Against University of Delaware

The tragic death of University of Delaware student, Laura Shanks, can be partially attributed to the institution’s lax security system.

Laura Shanks wasn’t provided with a reasonable 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-year-old’s death, which occurred at the beginning of 2006 Fall Semester, from a fatal mixture of cocaine and the painkiller Fentanyl, was as much a result 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 young adults took the deadly cocktail, which led to Ms. Shanks’ demise.

Hamilton was Shanks’s former boyfriend who’d been expelled and banned from campus in 2005 after police found 53.4 grams of marijuana in his Rodney Hall room. On the night 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 fact, when Laura was still in high school and investigating the school, the university’s website had touted the security system as “nationally renowned.” In addition to these willful misrepresentations, the complaints filed by the bereaved Shanks faulted the person-less keycard system as the sole form of residence hall security. Security resources in human form at the University of Delaware were sorely pressed at the time of the preventable tragedy. According to 2005 figures, for any given hour during a 24-hour day, only a dozen security and police officers were available to patrol 968 acres of land with 343 university buildings.

Wrongful death suits have become increasingly common in the United States in recent years. Thousands of deaths attributed to sundry forms of accidents, abuse, or negligence are eligible for the dubious category.

Alexandra Reed writes for Connecticut personal injury law firm, Stratton Faxon. Contact Stratton Faxon to speak with a Connecticut accident lawyer about your personal injury, wrongful death, or Connecticut malpractice case. To learn more, visit Strattonfaxon.com.

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