A 21-year-old woman who went to a Connecticut hospital with a broken ankle received so much pain medication that she suffocated and died, a lawsuit claims.
If Dale Martin had not gone to Waterbury Hospital, “she would be alive today,” the complaint states. “Dale’s healthcare providers at Waterbury Hospital should have kept her safe. Instead, they caused her death.”
On the morning of April 9, 2025, Martin was working on a New England farm. Her family said she had come to the Constitution State on a gap year from college.
While she was on the farm, Martin tripped and broke her ankle. Someone brought her to Waterbury Hospital in Waterbury, Connecticut, in the west-central part of the state. Staff diagnosed a complex fracture and scheduled her for surgery the next morning.
According to court documents attached to the complaint, Martin was “persistently crying in pain,” rated her pain a 10 out of 10, and said the morphine she received “worked for maybe 5 minutes.” Even so, Martin “was fine,” and she gave her family “a big smile” over FaceTime, the complaint says.
As the night went on, hospital workers gave Martin opioid pain medications, including through an IV, the lawsuit states. It adds, however, that the “medical providers administered such high doses of medication that Dale’s body’s impulse to breathe was impeded. She lay in her hospital bed, her lungs slowing and the oxygen flow to her body decreasing.”
Martin was suffocating while sedated, her family claims. Because no one checked on her, according to the lawsuit, “Dale could not even call for help as she suffocated.”
A nurse checked on the patient the following morning, but it was “far too late.” The complaint says Martin was “unresponsive” because she had stopped breathing and her heart had stopped.
“Hospital personnel were able to resuscitate Dale, but her brain injury was too severe for her to have any chance of recovery,” the lawsuit goes on. Doctors declared Martin brain-dead four days after her admission.
She reportedly suffered an anoxic encephalopathy, which happens “when the brain goes without oxygen, even for a short time.”
Martin’s father filed the lawsuit, which names Waterbury Hospital and one of its doctors among the defendants. As he tells it, they failed his daughter through improper supervision of staff, inadequate staffing, and a failure to check how the medication affected their patient, among other things.
The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of damages.
According to CT Insider, Prospect Medical Holdings owned the hospital when Martin died. UConn Health bought it from the bankrupt company in a taxpayer-funded $13 million deal that went through in March 2026.
“The quality, safety, and wellbeing of our patients is our top priority,” UConn Health told the outlet, referring further questions about the lawsuit to Prospect Medical Holdings. The company reportedly did not respond to CT Insider’s request for comment.
Leave a Reply