‘Is he dead?’: Texas family sues Fort Behavioral Health, alleging near-fatal negligence
If you or a loved one is experiencing a crisis or suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
There are things, now, that James can’t remember.
The details of his wedding. The tunes of the Lauren Daigle songs that played at his sons’ funerals. Things that his wife Meredith says you’d want to remember.
“It hurts me,” she said. “But it hurts me more because it hurts him.”
It’s been nearly a year since James came dangerously close to killing himself while under the care of Fort Behavioral Health, a residential treatment program in Fort Worth. He still has regular doctors appointments to try to determine the extent of the lasting damage to his body and brain, and it’s still unclear what he will recover over time.
One thing that is clear to James and Meredith, and to their attorney Robert Greening, is that none of this should’ve happened.
James was supposed to be safe in the adult residential treatment program at Fort Behavioral Health, under the care of trained staff who were responsible for making sure he didn’t hurt himself, they say.
“This is such a preventable tragedy,” Greening said.
James and Meredith, who asked to be identified in this story only by their first names, filed a lawsuit against Fort Behavioral Health at the end of September, over what they described as negligent treatment. Their allegations — that the staff left James unattended, ignored warning signs and ultimately failed to prevent him from seriously hurting himself — are the latest of multiple complaints and lawsuits against Fort Behavioral.
James and Meredith’s allegations have parallels to a 2020 case against the facility, in which an adult patient died.
Fort Behavioral came under scrutiny when state regulators suddenly shut down the center’s adolescent unit in January 2023, citing an “immediate threat to the health and safety of children.” The 30-day closure with little explanation left families scrambling to find alternatives; there are few residential facilities in Texas that provide this type of specialized treatment.
A Star-Telegram investigation into Fort Behavioral, published in fall 2023, found scores of violations of state laws and regulations. At least one staff member sexually abused a child, another physically fought a child, and the center was chronically understaffed, the investigation showed.
Fort Behavioral shut down its adolescent unit shortly after the Star-Telegram’s investigation, and the adult unit closed several months later. The youth and adult units were functionally separate but located on the same campus, had the same owner and sometimes cycled staff from one side to the other. (Fort Behavioral’s website remains active, but a recorded message on its main phone line said that the facility was not accepting or serving clients.)
Fort Behavioral owner Bobby Patton and CEO Stephen Mallick did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
James’ near-death experience last fall, while under professional care, illustrates the high stakes of behavioral health care.
A sense of relief
It was mid-November, a few days away from the anniversary of the death of one of James’ sons. They had lost a teenage son who had been killed in a car accident, and their 21-year-old son in an ATV accident.
James, who is now 50, was in Midland for work in the oil and gas industry, with Meredith at home in Arkansas. When she video-called him, he wouldn’t show his face, but she pieced together that he was drinking again — and that he’d tried to kill himself.
A couple of his friends sat with him through the night, and Meredith drove down to pick him up.
The next day, when Meredith got to James, he was still drunk, she said. She knew he needed professional help.
Meredith found Fort Behavioral Health. The facility’s adult side had a detox unit, and staff admitted James even knowing he was currently drunk and had attempted suicide the previous day. Meredith had worried those factors would be enough to deny admission.
When they walked in, Meredith remembers thinking the facility was serene, and the intake staff were kind. She felt relieved when they accepted James, relieved that he was safe, relieved that he’d be getting the care he needed.
She tried to be upfront with staff about some things that would be challenging for James. His serotonin levels were unusually low, for example. And, perhaps most important, the four-year anniversary of James’ son’s death was coming up. It was on Nov. 26, five days after he was admitted to the facility, and it had always been a hard day for him.
After James was admitted, Meredith stayed in Fort Worth for a few more days, saw her husband briefly on Thanksgiving, and then dropped off some clothes before she headed back to Arkansas for a while. By then, she was a bit skeptical of Fort Behavioral’s practices — the staff had told her that James wouldn’t be allowed to have his phone, but he was texting and calling her almost nonstop — but she was also exhausted. And she believed the Fort Behavioral staff could keep her husband safe.
She didn’t yet know what had been happening at the facility.
A death in 2020
Meredith brought James to Fort Behavioral during the in-between period, after the facility’s adolescent unit had shut down but before the adult unit had shut down.
It had been less than two months since the adolescent unit abruptly closed, in the wake of heightened scrutiny by state regulators and the Star-Telegram investigation. And while the adolescent and adult units operated separately, two former staff on the adult unit told the Star-Telegram in 2023 that the adult unit had problems with understaffing and inattention to patients, too.
Plus, there was the 2020 death of a patient on the adult side.
In April 2020, a man was sent to JPS Hospital after a suicide attempt. He was then transferred from JPS to Fort Behavioral for additional care.
According to documents later filed in a lawsuit against Fort Behavioral, the man was admitted to the residential treatment facility at 11:29 a.m. The lawsuit filings say Fort Behavioral staff did not screen the man, take away any of his personal items or assign anyone to sit with him.
Instead, lawsuit documents say, staff sent him to his room unsupervised.
At 1:45 p.m., about two hours after the man was admitted, he was found in his room without a pulse. Emergency medical providers were able to regain a pulse and transfer him back to JPS Hospital, but he died there the next day. He had killed himself, according to the lawsuit.
In March 2023, the man’s family, represented by Greening, settled the lawsuit against Fort Behavioral.
Eight months after the settlement, the case was about to repeat itself.
‘Today may be very hard for client’
As the anniversary of James’ son’s death drew closer, Meredith called Fort Behavioral several times to remind staff.
She was repeatedly hit with voicemail, she says, although a note in James’ medical file says she spoke with a staff member on Nov. 25. The note said Meredith reported that James seemed to be highly anxious and she was “concerned that he will act out or try to” leave the facility.
In the same note, a staff member reported direct observations of James, which stood in contrast to the concerns Meredith had voiced. The staff member wrote that James appeared to be “feeling better and enjoyed lunch.”
The next morning, on the anniversary, Meredith talked to a staff member again, she said. A note in James’ medical file recorded the conversation, and said Meredith told the staff member that she’d been calling and no one had gotten back to her.
“Client’s wife also reported that today was the anniversary of (the death of) one (of) client’s sons and that she just wanted us to know, today may be very hard for client,” the note reads.
The staff member who took the call told Meredith that “all issues would be addressed,” according to the note.
Less than three hours later, according to medical records, Fort Behavioral staff found James in his room, unresponsive and without a pulse.
‘Is he dead?’
Meredith distinctly remembers the call from Fort Behavioral. She was sitting on her best friend’s couch. When she saw the caller ID, she thought that James was calling her from a Fort Behavioral landline.
When she picked up, though, and it was a social worker, her brain switched tracks immediately. Her first question was, “Is he dead?”
The social worker told Meredith that emergency medical workers had gotten James’ pulse back, and that he was being transferred to JPS. The next thing she asked, Meredith said, was what had happened.
“In my mind, he’s supposed to be safe,” Meredith said. “He’s in a protected medical facility.”
Before she got off the phone with the social worker, Meredith asked to speak to one of the paramedics on the scene.
“I told (the paramedic) I did not care what she had to do, how many times she had to do it, under no circumstances was he to not be breathing by some shape, form or fashion when I got to that hospital,” Meredith said. “That it was going to be my decision, and not for her to make.”
Meredith and her best friend didn’t stop for food or bathroom breaks on the six-hour drive from Arkansas to Fort Worth.
As they drove, Meredith did three things. She cried. She vaped. And she thought about the people she’d buried in recent years — two sons, and now maybe James, too.
“Every 18 months, I’m having to bury somebody,” she said. “It’s like a never-ending cycle.”
Meredith was most of the way to Fort Worth before she got an update on James. Medical personnel had performed CPR and brought back James’ pulse three times, according to his medical records. But he was alive.
‘I don’t have any feeling’
Meredith remembers when she saw James, lying in a hospital bed, unconscious, wearing a cervical collar and a breathing tube. He was surrounded by machines, “all the machines,” but that was it.
“There was no one with him, he was alone,” Meredith said. “That in itself would break your heart.”
James, somewhat miraculously, survived. He stayed in the hospital for several days, and then in a residential treatment center for a while longer.
He’s living in Midland now, with Meredith, but the couple makes regular trips back to the Metroplex for doctor appointments. They still don’t know how extensive the damage to James’ brain is, or how much his body can recover over time.
He’s hit with regular headaches, pain in other parts of his body and memory lapses. He doesn’t remember most of his time at Fort Behavioral, just snippets of scenes: he remembers vacuuming one day, he remembers a staff member asking for his cell phone, he remembers seeing someone sitting in a hallway. He doesn’t remember the aftermath of his suicide attempt.
But right now, he said, he’s focusing on feeling again — because something about the near-death experience has sapped him of his feelings, he said.
“I definitely don’t get excited about anything anymore,” James said. “I don’t have any feeling, I don’t have any kind of an emotional side anymore.”
Although people might not have guessed it, James said, he used to have a lot of feelings. Since Fort Behavioral, the only time he feels much of anything, he said, is when he’s in church.
“It drained me of my emotions,” he said.
And, the couple’s attorney says, all the trauma that James and Meredith have been through was entirely preventable.
‘Maybe this won’t happen to another patient’
Greening, the attorney, filed Meredith and James’ lawsuit in Tarrant County District Court last week. In the filing, Meredith and James are anonymous.
Greening said he’s seen in the last few years an increasing number of cases that are similar to this one.
In his opinion, much of the problem stems from a lack of training and a lack of protocols at behavioral health care facilities, which results in dangerous negligence.
Greening said he hopes the lawsuit against Fort Behavioral can help Meredith and James get justice — “as best as we can get justice for them” — in the form of compensation.
That means Greening is aiming to get Fort Behavioral’s insurance to pay out both economic damages to account for the money the couple has lost to medical bills and time off of work, as well as damages to account for the emotional trauma and other impacts on their lives.
For medical malpractice cases, Texas state law caps non-economic damages at $250,000 per health care institution. Fort Behavioral’s closure doesn’t impact the lawsuit, Greening said, since the funds would come from the facility’s insurance.
The attorney also hopes malpractice lawsuits such as this one can help make facilities like Fort Behavioral safer for other patients.
“My bottom line in doing these cases is prevention in the future,” Greening said. “Maybe this won’t happen to another patient.”
Meredith and James, too, said they don’t want to see anyone else go through what they’ve gone through.
“For me, I just don’t want it to happen to anybody else,” James said.
This story was originally published October 8, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
