The Tragic Death of Alex Pierce

One month and ten days ago, Alex Pierce would have been celebrating his 14th birthday. Instead, his parents are in the process of filing a wrongful death claim against the Murrieta Valley Unified School district for his death in a swimming pool on school property.

Celebrating at an end of the year pool party for band and choir members of Dorothy McElhinney Middle School, Alex slipped under the water and no one noticed that he was missing until a classmate pointed out that he was at the bottom of the swimming pool. According to reports, he was underwater for almost two minutes before being brought to the surface by a pair of classmates. Even though there were Murrieta High School students as active life guards on duty, CPR was not administered until members of the Murrieta Police Department arrived to the scene, leaving him without oxygen for almost nine minutes.

According to the San Bernardino injury attorneys at Panish Shea & Boyle who are representing his family in this matter, “Without a doubt, if they were doing their job – even remotely appropriately – Alex would still be here today, totally harm-free.” Instead, after fighting for a month and being declared brain dead at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, Alex passed away on July 7th.

How do Wrongful Death Claims Work?

While no amount of money can bring Alex back or truly ease his family’s pain, cases like these, involving gross amounts of negligence on behalf of the supervisors of the party, exemplify how and why wrongful death cases are filed in California. In California, a wrongful death claim can be filed as the result of a wrongful act or negligence by a person or entity. Determining negligence requires a few criteria to be satisfied: The defendant, in this case the school district, owed a duty to the plaintiff, or to keep him safe. The defendant then breached this duty, via poor supervision and not administering CPR, and this breach of duty was the root cause of the plaintiff’s injuries and actual damages.

If these above criteria are satisfied, then a wrongful death claim may be filed by the deceased person’s surviving spouse, children, or anyone who would be entitled to the property via intestate succession, in this case his parents. In California, the statute of limitations, or time limit that one of the above mentioned parties has to file a claim, for a wrongful death claim provides two years from the date of the accident to file a claim.

What Damages are Available?

In most personal injury cases, including wrongful death, damages are split into two different categories: economic and non-economic damages. In these types of cases, economic damages refer to compensating the estate for losses suffered as the result of the wrongful death, including medical costs, lost income, and funeral/burial expenses. Non-economic damages compensate the surviving family members for less concrete damages such as the value of household services or the loss of love or affection, known as a loss of consortium. In the Alex Pierce case, the full range of damages will be available to his family.

The case of Alex Pierce is nothing short of a tragedy. A child attends something as innocuous as a pool party with his classmates and ends up dying as a result. While no parent ever wants to file a wrongful death claim for their child, through litigation, hopefully they will be able to find some closure and raise awareness to prevent anything like this from happening in the future.