Northglenn Assisted Living Wrongful Death: When the Care Records Lie and the Camera Tells the Truth
You put your mother in a facility because she needed care you could not give her yourself. You read the care plan. It promised welfare checks every two hours. You trusted it. And now you are sitting with a death certificate and a video that shows the truth the paperwork was built to hide: a 77-year-old woman on the floor, calling for help that did not come, for hours. The records say the checks happened. The camera says they did not. And your mother is dead.
We are writing this for you — the family that discovered the gap between what a facility wrote down and what actually happened inside a room at Northglenn Heights Assisted Living and Memory Care Community. What follows is not a news summary. It is the legal and medical analysis a senior trial attorney would give you at a kitchen table in Adams County, if you could sit across from one at 2 a.m. and ask every question you have.
Here is the first thing to know: the video evidence your family preserved is the single most powerful asset in this case. It eliminates the facility’s ability to deny what happened. It transforms falsified welfare-check logs from a paperwork discrepancy into evidence of deliberate concealment. And it changes the legal character of this case from ordinary neglect — which caps and compromise can bury — into something far more serious: conscious disregard for a vulnerable human being, documented on camera, covered up on paper.
We handle wrongful death claims and the catastrophic-injury fights that sit beneath them. We are a trial firm that takes Colorado cases, working with local counsel where required. The education, the governing law, the evidence clocks, and the honest evaluation of what a case like this is worth — that is what this page gives you. If we are not the right fit for your family, we will tell you. But the information below is yours either way, because the clock on your mother’s evidence is already running.
What Happened at Northglenn Heights — and What the Video Proves
A wrongful death lawsuit filed in Adams County District Court alleges that a 77-year-old resident was admitted to Northglenn Heights Assisted Living and Memory Care Community in January 2024 with a documented high risk of falling. Her care plan — the written document the facility created and was legally obligated to follow — required in-person welfare checks every two hours. That care plan was not a suggestion. It was the standard of care the facility itself defined for this specific resident, based on her assessed vulnerabilities.
The lawsuit claims she suffered multiple falls and was left on the floor, unattended, for periods ranging from three to nearly seven hours. On multiple occasions. The word “multiple” matters: this was not a single bad night. It was a pattern.
Then there is the video. Covert footage captured this woman on the floor, calling for help, while the care records said staff had been checking on her every two hours. The discrepancy between what the logs claim and what the camera shows is not a clerical error. It is the difference between documentation and falsification. And it is the engine that drives this case from standard negligence into the territory of punitive damages.
The lawsuit alleges that the neglect — the prolonged floor time, the absence of the welfare checks she was promised, the abandonment — caused her hospitalization with a diagnosis of traumatic rhabdomyolysis and severe dehydration. She eventually died. Her family’s attorneys have also referred the matter to the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office for potential criminal review. The DA’s Office acknowledged receipt and stated the matter is under review.
The corporate defendants named in the lawsuit include Tarantino Properties, the management company operating the facility during the 2024 period when all alleged neglect occurred, and HMP Senior Solutions, which assumed management in April 2025 — approximately a year after the events. HMP has publicly stated it was not involved in the facility’s operations during the relevant period and that the employees referenced are no longer employed there. Tarantino Properties has not publicly responded to the allegations.
What the generalist misses here is the relationship between the video and the falsified records. Most neglect cases are built on circumstantial evidence — staffing shortages, thin documentation, the word of an exhausted aide against the word of a corporate defense team. This case is different. The video does not merely prove neglect. It proves that the facility’s own records are false. And when a facility’s records are demonstrably false, every other record it produced — every staffing sheet, every incident report, every certification of compliance — becomes suspect. That is a credibility collapse that reaches the jury box with force.
The Medical Truth: How Hours on a Floor Killed a 77-Year-Old Woman
The word on the death certificate pathway is “rhabdomyolysis.” Most people have never heard it. But every geriatrician, every emergency physician, and every nursing home administrator in Colorado knows exactly what it means — and exactly how it happens when an elderly person is left on a hard floor for hours.
Here is the mechanism, in plain language. When a human body lies immobile on a hard surface for an extended period, the body’s own weight compresses the skeletal muscle between bone and floor. Blood flow to that muscle stops. The muscle tissue, starved of oxygen, begins to die. As muscle cells rupture, they dump their interior contents into the bloodstream — a protein called myoglobin, potassium, creatine kinase, and other intracellular compounds. This is rhabdomyolysis: the destruction of skeletal muscle from prolonged compression.
The myoglobin is the killer. In small amounts, the kidneys filter it harmlessly. But in the quantities that hours of muscle necrosis produce, myoglobin clogs and chemically damages the kidney’s filtering tubules — specifically the distal convoluted tubules, where the damage concentrates. The kidneys begin to fail. Acute kidney injury sets in. Meanwhile, the potassium released from dying muscle cells builds up in the blood because the failing kidneys cannot clear it. High potassium scrambles the heart’s electrical rhythm. In a debilitated 77-year-old, this cascade — muscle death, kidney failure, electrolyte derangement, cardiac instability — can be fatal.
The medical literature calls this “long-lie syndrome.” It is a recognized, well-established clinical entity in the geriatric fall literature. It is not exotic. It is not controversial. It is the predictable, documented, textbook consequence of leaving an elderly person on a floor for hours.
And then there is the dehydration. The lawsuit alleges severe dehydration alongside the rhabdomyolysis. Dehydration does not merely compound the kidney injury — it accelerates it. The kidneys need fluid to filter toxins. A dehydrated kidney is a dry sponge trying to clean a flood. The myoglobin that the kidneys might otherwise partially clear instead concentrates in already-stressed renal tissue, deepening the damage. Severe dehydration in an elderly resident is itself evidence of neglect: a woman on a floor for hours cannot reach water. She cannot call for water. She depends entirely on the staff who were supposed to be checking on her every two hours — the staff whose records say they did, and whose camera says they did not.
The hospitalization records are the bridge. When this woman was finally found and taken to the hospital, the emergency physicians would have drawn blood. Among the labs would be a creatine kinase level — CK, the enzyme that tracks muscle damage. CK rises in a predictable curve after muscle injury, peaking 24 to 72 hours after the insult. A CK level five times the upper limit of normal — roughly above 1,000 units per liter — is the conventional diagnostic threshold for rhabdomyolysis. Levels above 8,500 have been shown to predict renal failure. The CK draw, with its timestamp, correlates the duration of floor time to the severity of muscle destruction. The video shows how long she was down. The CK level shows what that time did to her body. Together they are specific causation: the neglect did not merely precede the death. It caused it.
The defense will argue she was elderly, frail, and declining. The answer is the eggshell-plaintiff doctrine, which every jurisdiction recognizes in some form: a defendant takes the victim as found. A frail 77-year-old is precisely the person the two-hour welfare checks were designed to protect. Her vulnerability does not excuse the neglect. It is the reason the care plan existed in the first place. And the defense will argue the rhabdomyolysis came from some other source — a medication, a pre-existing condition. The answer is the timeline: a documented fall, a documented period on the floor, a CK curve that matches the compression duration, and a kidney injury that follows. The chain is tight. The generalist who does not understand this medical cascade pleads “neglect caused death” without being able to explain how — and a defense expert dismantles the gap. We do not leave that gap.
Who Is Responsible: The Corporate Stack Behind an Assisted Living Facility
The first thing to understand about an assisted living facility is that the name on the door is rarely the whole story. These homes are built like a stack of separate companies, each designed to stand between the injured resident and the money.
At the bottom is the licensed operating entity — the LLC that holds the state license, admitted your mother, and signed the care contract. This entity owes your mother a direct duty of reasonable care. It cannot delegate that duty away. In legal terms, the duty to maintain safe care conditions is non-delegable — the facility remains responsible even when it hires a management company to run day-to-day operations.
On top of the operating entity sits the management company. In this case, that was Tarantino Properties during the period when your mother was a resident and when all the alleged neglect occurred. The management company is the entity that set the staffing levels, implemented (or failed to implement) the care plan, supervised the employees, and — critically — controlled the documentation system that produced the falsified welfare-check logs. The management company’s decisions about how many aides to schedule on a given shift, how to train them, and how to verify their work are the operational choices that directly caused the neglect.
Then there are the individual staff members. The employees who documented welfare checks that never happened are not merely negligent. They are direct tort actors whose knowing falsification supports individual negligence claims, potential fraud claims, and — significantly — punitive damages exposure that may sit outside any institutional damage cap. The lawsuit states that the employees involved are no longer employed at the facility. High turnover at assisted living facilities means former employees disperse quickly. Finding them, taking their statements, and learning whether the falsification was their own idea or a tolerated practice imposed by staffing pressures is a discovery priority that starts on day one.
And then there is HMP Senior Solutions, which assumed management in April 2025. HMP has publicly stated it was not involved during the period of alleged neglect. That may be true. But HMP’s liability — if any — will turn on documents most families never think to demand: the management-transition agreement, any asset-purchase provisions, any assumption-of-liability clauses, and any indemnification arrangements between Tarantino and HMP. Sometimes a new management company assumes specific liabilities as part of the transition. Sometimes the old company retains full exposure. Sometimes indemnification provisions shift responsibility between them. The point is that the transition documents are the map, and they can be buried in the transfer — subpoenaed early, before either defendant can characterize the deal on its own terms.
What the generalist misses is the non-delegable duty doctrine and the management-company’s direct operational control. A lawyer who names only the facility entity and not the management company may find that the facility LLC is thinly capitalized — engineered to hold the license and the liability but not the assets. The real operational decisions, the staffing budgets, the supervision systems — those were made one entity up the stack. Suing the shell and missing the decision-maker is how a strong neglect case turns into an uncollectible judgment.
Colorado Wrongful Death Law: The Rules That Govern Your Family’s Case
Colorado’s wrongful death statute gives certain surviving family members the right to recover for the death of a loved one caused by another’s wrongful act, neglect, or default. The law is codified at Colorado’s wrongful death statutes, which establish who may bring the claim, what damages are recoverable, and how long the family has to file.
The statute of limitations. In Colorado, a wrongful death action generally must be filed within two years of the date of death. This is not a soft deadline. It is a hard bar — miss it and the case is over, regardless of how strong the evidence is. There are nuances: the first year after death may belong exclusively to the surviving spouse, and the filing class can expand in the second year. But the outer limit is two years from death. That sounds like a long time. It is not. The evidence in an assisted living neglect case — the video, the logs, the staffing records, the employee memories — decays far faster than the statute runs. The deadline and the evidence clock are two different things, and the evidence clock is the one that should worry you.
The survival action. Colorado also recognizes a survival statute, which preserves the claims the deceased person would have had during the interval between injury and death. This is a separate cause of action from the wrongful death claim, and it belongs to the estate rather than to the surviving family members. What it captures is critically important in this case: the pre-death pain and suffering your mother endured — lying on the floor, calling for help, for hours, across multiple episodes — followed by hospitalization and diagnosis before death. That suffering is compensable. It is an asset of the estate. And depending on how Colorado courts apply the damage-cap regimes, the survival-action damages may not be subject to the same cap as the wrongful death beneficiaries’ non-economic damages. This is a technical point, but it is worth real money.
Comparative negligence. Colorado follows a modified comparative negligence system with a 50% bar. Under this rule, your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, and if your fault reaches 50% or above, recovery is barred entirely. In this case, comparative fault is unlikely to be a meaningful deflator. Your mother was a documented high fall risk in a facility that created a care plan acknowledging that risk. She was dependent on staff for her safety. The facility had exclusive control over her welfare. The defense may try to argue she should have used a call button or waited more patiently, but those arguments are weak against video evidence of a woman on the floor calling for help that never came.
The damage-cap fight — the most important strategic variable in the case. This is where the characterization of the claims becomes case-determinative. Colorado has two different non-economic damage cap regimes. If the court characterizes the claims as medical malpractice under the Health Care Availability Act, non-economic damages are subject to one set of statutory caps, adjusted for inflation. If the claims are treated as ordinary negligence, a different cap regime applies. The cap amounts differ, and the distinction can be worth millions.
In this case, the argument for ordinary negligence characterization is strong. The core failures were custodial: welfare checks that were not performed, a resident who was not supervised, records that were falsified. These are not failures of professional medical judgment — they are failures of basic care and attention. A physician did not make a diagnostic error. A nurse did not misinterpret lab results. An aide did not come when called. The distinction matters because the ordinary negligence caps are generally more favorable to plaintiffs than the medical malpractice caps, and because the survival action’s cap treatment may differ from the wrongful death cap treatment depending on characterization.
Punitive damages. Colorado’s punitive damages statute allows a jury to award exemplary damages in addition to compensatory damages when the defendant’s conduct was committed with fraud, malice, or willful and wanton disregard. The statute generally caps punitive damages at the amount of actual (compensatory) damages — a one-to-one ratio. But the court has discretion to award up to treble (three times) punitive damages in especially egregious cases. The falsified welfare-check records are the factual predicate for exceeding the default cap. When staff documented checks that video proves never occurred, that is not negligence. That is concealment. And concealment of neglect is the textbook definition of willful and wanton conduct that punitive damages exist to punish.
The regulatory framework. Assisted living facilities in Colorado are licensed and regulated by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment under the state’s administrative code, which establishes minimum standards for resident care, staffing, welfare checks, incident reporting, and recordkeeping. The CDPHE maintains inspection and complaint records for every licensed facility in the state. Those records are discoverable in civil litigation — and they often reveal patterns: prior citations for inadequate staffing, missed checks, or recordkeeping violations at the same facility that predate your mother’s residency. That pattern evidence supplies notice and supports punitive damages.
Colorado also has a mandatory elder-abuse reporting law that requires certain professionals to report suspected abuse, neglect, or exploitation of at-risk adults. A violation can be a criminal offense. When staff falsified records rather than reporting the neglect, that silence is itself a regulatory breach — and it is discoverable as evidence of consciousness of guilt.
The District Attorney’s Office for the 17th Judicial District, which covers Adams County, received a letter from the family’s attorneys asking whether criminal charges would be considered. The office provided a public statement:
“As a general matter, the District Attorney’s Office does not prosecute facilities, as that authority typically falls outside the Office’s statutory jurisdiction. The Office’s role is limited to reviewing and prosecuting alleged criminal wrongdoing or neglect by individuals when supported by evidence. Licensing, regulation, and oversight of assisted living and memory care facilities are generally handled by the appropriate state regulatory agencies.”
That statement tells you something important: the criminal system has limits. It may pursue individuals. It may not. It does not compensate your family. The civil case is where accountability lives — and the civil case does not wait for the criminal process to finish.
The Evidence Clock: What Records Exist and How Fast They Can Disappear
Every assisted living neglect case is a race against evidence destruction. Not malicious destruction — routine destruction. Facilities operate on retention schedules. Video systems overwrite automatically. Employees leave. Paper records cycle out. If no one sends a litigation-hold letter ordering the facility to freeze everything, the proof of what happened to your mother can legally vanish before the case is ever filed.
Here is the evidence that matters in this case, who holds it, and how fast it can die:
In-room video footage. This is the crown jewel. The video showing your mother on the floor, calling for help, while staff did not respond is the single most decisive piece of evidence in the case. It proves the neglect. It disproves the falsified records. It anchors the punitive damages argument. The facility’s DVR or NVR system typically overwrites on a rolling cycle — commonly 7 to 30 days. If the family’s attorney has already preserved this footage, chain of custody and completeness must be confirmed. If it has not been preserved, it may already be gone. This is the fastest-dying, most important record in the entire case.
Hallway and common-area surveillance video. These cameras may show whether staff approached your mother’s room during the documented welfare-check times — whether they walked past the door without entering, whether they were present in the hallway at all, or whether the wing was entirely unstaffed. Same overwrite risk as the in-room footage. A preservation demand must be served on both management companies and the facility entity immediately.
Falsified welfare-check logs and care-plan documentation. The discrepancy between the documented checks and the video reality is the punitive-damages engine. But paper records can be altered, “corrected,” backdated, or destroyed. A litigation hold must be served on Tarantino Properties, HMP Senior Solutions, and the facility entity — in writing, naming these specific records, demanding their preservation. The hold letter is what converts an automatic records-purge into sanctionable spoliation if the documents disappear.
Staffing schedules, assignment records, and time clocks. These records establish whether the facility even had enough staff on the floor to perform two-hour checks, and they identify each employee responsible for your mother’s wing during the specific neglect periods. Employee turnover at assisted living facilities is high. Former employees identified in these records are already dispersing — they change phone numbers, move, and forget details. Locating them for statements is a time-sensitive task that begins the day you call a lawyer.
CDPHE inspection reports, complaint histories, and citation records. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment maintains public inspection and complaint records for every licensed assisted living facility in the state. Prior findings of inadequate staffing, missed welfare checks, or recordkeeping violations at Northglenn Heights supply pattern evidence, notice to the facility, and punitive-damages support. These are public records, but they should be obtained and analyzed before any subsequent inspection triggered by this lawsuit alters the regulatory narrative.
Hospitalization records. The medical records from your mother’s hospitalization document the rhabdomyolysis diagnosis, the creatine kinase levels, the renal function tests, and the dehydration markers. The CK levels and their timestamps correlate the duration of floor time to the severity of muscle damage — this is the specific causation bridge. Medical records are generally retained long-term, but they should be obtained before any facility-affiliated provider can influence interpretation.
Corporate transition and management agreements. The documents governing the transition from Tarantino Properties to HMP Senior Solutions determine whether HMP assumed any liability, whether Tarantino retained full exposure, and whether indemnification provisions shift responsibility between the defendants. Corporate documents can be buried in the transition. They must be subpoenaed early, before either defendant can characterize the transfer unfavorably.
Employee personnel files. The training records, prior disciplinary actions, and supervision history of every staff member involved in your mother’s care establish negligent hiring and retention claims. The personnel files show whether the facility knew — or should have known — that these employees had reliability problems. These files must be preserved before routine purging removes them.
The preservation letter is the countermeasure to every one of these clocks. It goes out to every defendant and every record-holder the day you call. It names every category of evidence. It creates a legal duty to preserve. And if records disappear after that letter is on file, the law answers — with adverse-inference instructions that let the jury assume the lost evidence was as bad as the plaintiff says, with sanctions, and in some circumstances with separate claims for the destruction itself.
What the Facility’s Insurer Will Try — and How Each Play Fails
The insurance company behind an assisted living facility has a playbook. It is not improvised. It is a sequence of moves designed to minimize what the facility pays, built on decades of defending neglect cases. Here are the plays you should expect, and the counter to each one.
Play 1: “She was declining anyway.” The insurer will argue your mother was elderly, frail, and in declining health — that her death was the natural progression of her existing conditions, not the result of neglect. This is the eggshell-plaintiff attack, and it fails for two reasons. First, the law takes the victim as found — a defendant cannot reduce its liability by pointing to the victim’s pre-existing vulnerability. Second, the care plan itself acknowledged her vulnerability. The facility created a two-hour welfare-check schedule precisely because it recognized she was at high risk. Her frailty is the reason the duty existed, not an excuse for breaching it.
Play 2: “Our records show we did the checks.” The facility will point to its welfare-check logs as proof of compliance. This play dies on the video. When the camera shows your mother on the floor for hours and the logs show checks that did not happen, the records are not evidence of compliance — they are evidence of falsification. A jury that sees documentation contradicted by video does not credit the documentation. It credits the video. And it asks what else was falsified.
Play 3: “New management — not our problem.” HMP Senior Solutions will argue it was not operating the facility during the relevant period and should be dismissed. The counter lives in the corporate transition documents. If HMP assumed liabilities as part of the management transfer, it is in the case. If it did not, Tarantino remains fully exposed. Either way, the facility entity itself — the LLC that admitted your mother and owed her the non-delegable duty of care — cannot walk away by pointing to a change in management companies. The duty was hers, not the management company’s to transfer.
Play 4: “This was one rogue employee.” The facility will try to isolate the blame on individual aides who have since been terminated. But the falsification of records across multiple occasions suggests a systemic problem, not an individual one. When multiple employees document checks that did not happen across multiple shifts and multiple episodes, that pattern points to a culture of documentation fraud — a culture created by understaffing, inadequate training, and supervision that tolerated or encouraged paper compliance over actual care. The depositions of the individual employees will test whether they were directed to falsify records by supervisors, whether staffing levels made the checks impossible to perform, and whether the practice was known to management.
Play 5: “This is medical malpractice — apply the lower caps.” The defense will try to characterize the claims as medical malpractice under the Health Care Availability Act to invoke the more restrictive damage caps. The counter is that the core failures were custodial, not medical. A welfare check is not a medical procedure. Failing to look in on a resident is not a diagnostic error. Falsifying a log is not a treatment decision. The ordinary negligence caps should apply, and the survival action’s cap treatment should be argued separately.
Play 6: The quick settlement offer. Within weeks or months, the facility’s insurer may offer a settlement that sounds substantial to a grieving family but is a fraction of what the case is worth — especially before the video has been authenticated, before the CDPHE records have been pulled, and before the corporate transition documents have been produced. The offer will come with a release. It is designed to close the case before the family understands the full scope of the evidence. No family should sign a release from a care facility before consulting a lawyer who has reviewed the complete record. The insurer’s first offer is a floor, not a ceiling — and it is calculated to be lower than the case’s discovery value.
What a Case Like This Is Worth
Case value in an assisted living wrongful death case is driven by several variables: the strength of the liability evidence, the severity of the harm, the availability of punitive damages, the applicable damage caps, and the collectibility of the defendants. Here is an honest framework, not a promise.
The liability evidence in this case is as strong as it gets. Video of the resident on the floor, combined with falsified care records, creates near-absolute liability clarity. The defense cannot credibly deny what happened. That changes the negotiation posture from “did they do it” to “what is it worth” — which is a fundamentally different and more valuable conversation.
The harm is catastrophic and well-documented. The rhabdomyolysis diagnosis, the CK levels, the severe dehydration, the hospitalization, and the death establish a clear medical cascade from neglect to fatality. The pre-death suffering — hours on the floor, across multiple episodes, calling for help — is compensable through the survival action and is among the most emotionally resonant damages a jury can hear.
On the low end, if the court characterizes all claims under the Health Care Availability Act’s medical-malpractice damage caps, punitive damages are limited to the statutory default, and collectibility is constrained to Tarantino Properties’ insurance limits without meaningful contribution from HMP, the case value range is approximately $1,000,000 to $2,500,000.
On the high end, if the claims are characterized as ordinary negligence — avoiding the HCAA’s more restrictive caps — and the falsified-records evidence drives a punitive award at or near the trebled-actual-damages ceiling, and survival-action pain-and-suffering damages are recovered separately from the wrongful death beneficiaries’ damages, and Tarantino Properties carries sufficient coverage or assets to satisfy a substantial judgment, the case value range is approximately $4,000,000 to $8,000,000.
These are not predictions. They are the brackets that the evidence, the law, and the defendants’ coverage structure support. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Where a case lands within this range depends on discovery outcomes, the cap-characterization ruling, the strength of the punitive-damages evidence at deposition, and the willingness of the defendants to resolve versus try the case in Adams County.
The video and the falsification are what elevate this case above a standard neglect claim. A standard neglect case — one without video, without falsified records, without the conscious-disregard predicate — settles lower because the defense can dispute liability and the punitive lever is weak. This case has both. That does not guarantee a number. It does change the negotiation corridor.
For more on how case value is actually built, Ralph Manginello has recorded a detailed discussion of what personal injury cases are worth — the analysis applies to wrongful death valuation as well.
How We Build the Case: From Preservation Letter to Verdict
Here is how a case like this is actually built — the chronological walk from the day a family calls to the day a number is reached.
Week one: preservation. The first move is a litigation-hold letter to Tarantino Properties, HMP Senior Solutions, and the facility entity. It names every category of evidence: all video footage, all welfare-check logs, all staffing schedules and time records, all CDPHE inspection reports and complaint files, all hospitalization records, all corporate transition documents, and all personnel files for every employee involved in the resident’s care. The hold letter is what freezes the evidence before the overwrite cycles and retention schedules can legally erase it.
Weeks two through four: records collection. The CDPHE inspection and complaint history for Northglenn Heights is pulled and analyzed for prior patterns. The hospitalization records — CK levels, renal function, dehydration markers, timestamps — are obtained and reviewed by a medical expert. The corporate transition documents between Tarantino and HMP are subpoenaed. The care plan, the admission records, and the resident’s complete chart are demanded from the facility.
Months two through four: expert retention. A geriatrician or internist is retained to explain the rhabdomyolysis-to-renal-failure cascade for causation — to testify that the prolonged floor time caused the muscle damage that caused the kidney failure that caused the death. A certified nursing home administrator is retained to testify that two-hour welfare checks for a high-fall-risk resident are a minimum industry standard, and that falsifying those checks is a deviation from the standard of care that goes beyond negligence. If the authenticity or timing of log entries is disputed, a forensic document examiner is brought in.
Months three through six: depositions. The specific employees who falsified records are deposed. Their testimony about who directed or tolerated the falsification may reach corporate policy rather than rogue individual conduct. The management company’s operations director is deposed about staffing levels, training protocols, and supervision. The corporate transition is examined through the documents and the negotiators.
Months six through twelve: the number is built. A life-care planner or forensic economist quantifies the economic losses — hospitalization costs, funeral expenses, the cost of residential care during the neglect period. The non-economic damages are built from the evidence: the video of your mother on the floor, the CK levels, the documented duration of suffering, the falsified records that prove consciousness of guilt. The punitive damages argument is structured around the gap between what the records claim and what the camera shows.
Mediation and trial. Mediation should be deferred until the video evidence has been authenticated and the corporate-transition documents have been produced, because the falsification finding and the defendant-allocation question are the two variables that most drive the settlement corridor. If the case does not resolve, it is tried in Adams County District Court in Brighton — the courthouse where the jury will be drawn from the same communities where families like yours live, work, and make care decisions for their aging parents.
The First 72 Hours: What Your Family Should Do Now
If you are reading this in the days or weeks after losing your mother, here is the practical roadmap.
Do not sign anything from the facility or its insurer. No release, no settlement agreement, no authorization for the facility to obtain records, no statement about what happened. The first document the facility’s insurer pushes toward a grieving family is a release — and it is designed to close the case before the family has had time to understand what happened.
Do not give a recorded statement. A friendly-sounding representative may call to “check on the family” and ask you to “just tell us what happened” on a recording. That recording is built to be quoted against you. Every answer you give is a potential defense exhibit. Decline politely and call a lawyer.
Do not post about the case on social media. The facility’s insurer and defense team monitor social media. A post about your mother’s death, a photo, a comment about the facility — all of it can be taken out of context and used to undermine your case.
Preserve everything you have. If you have video footage, back it up in multiple locations and do not alter it. If you have photographs, text messages, emails, or correspondence with the facility, save all of it. If you have the admission paperwork, the care plan, the billing statements — gather them.
Open the estate. A wrongful death action in Colorado requires the appointment of a personal representative — the person authorized to bring the family’s case. If your mother had a will, the personal representative may be named there. If not, the court will appoint one. This is a procedural step we handle for families.
Contact CDPHE. You can file a complaint with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment about the care your mother received. The CDPHE’s investigation and findings are separate from your civil case, but they can produce valuable regulatory records.
Call a lawyer. Not because you are required to — because the evidence clock is running, and the preservation letter is the only thing that stops it. The consultation is free. The call costs nothing. And the conversation will tell you whether you have a case, what it is worth, and what the next steps are — whether or not you hire us.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a wrongful death lawsuit in Colorado?
Colorado’s wrongful death statute of limitations generally runs two years from the date of death. The first year after death may belong exclusively to the surviving spouse, with the filing class expanding in the second year. But the outer deadline is two years. And the evidence — video, logs, staffing records — dies far faster than the statute runs. The deadline to sue and the deadline to save the proof are different clocks. Act on the faster one.
Who can file a wrongful death claim in Colorado?
Colorado’s wrongful death statute defines a hierarchy of beneficiaries who may bring the claim — typically the surviving spouse, then children, then parents, depending on who survived the decedent. A personal representative must be appointed to file on behalf of the estate. The exact beneficiary class depends on the family structure. We handle the appointment as part of the case.
What is rhabdomyolysis and how does it connect to neglect?
Rhabdomyolysis is the destruction of skeletal muscle from prolonged compression — exactly what happens when an elderly person lies on a hard floor for hours. The dying muscle releases proteins and electrolytes into the bloodstream that cause acute kidney injury and can be fatal. In the geriatric literature, this is called “long-lie syndrome.” The connection to neglect is direct: a resident who is checked every two hours as her care plan requires does not lie on the floor long enough for this cascade to develop. The CK blood test at the hospital correlates the duration of floor time to the severity of muscle damage.
What makes falsified care records so important?
Falsified records transform the case from ordinary negligence into a case that supports punitive damages. When staff documented welfare checks that video proves never occurred, that is not a clerical error — it is concealment. Colorado’s punitive damages statute allows enhanced awards for willful and wanton conduct, and the court has discretion to treble the punitive award. The gap between the documented checks and the video reality is the factual predicate for that argument.
Can the facility be criminally charged?
The 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office has acknowledged receipt of a letter from the family’s attorneys and stated the matter is under review. The DA’s Office noted that its role is limited to reviewing and prosecuting alleged criminal wrongdoing by individuals, not facilities, and that licensing and regulation of assisted living facilities is generally handled by state regulatory agencies. The criminal process is independent of the civil case and does not control the family’s civil recovery. A criminal prosecution — if one occurs — and a civil wrongful death action can proceed in parallel.
What if the management company changed — who is responsible?
The management company during the period of alleged neglect was Tarantino Properties. HMP Senior Solutions assumed management in April 2025, approximately a year after the events. HMP disputes involvement during the relevant period. The facility entity itself — the LLC that admitted the resident and owed her the duty of care — remains responsible regardless of which management company was operating day to day. The duty to maintain safe care conditions is non-delegable. The corporate transition documents between Tarantino and HMP will determine whether HMP assumed any liabilities or whether Tarantino retains full exposure.
What is the difference between a wrongful death claim and a survival action?
A wrongful death claim belongs to the surviving family members and compensates them for the losses they suffered from the death — lost companionship, lost guidance, lost financial support. A survival action belongs to the estate and preserves the claims the deceased person would have had during the interval between injury and death — including pre-death pain and suffering. In this case, the survival action captures the hours your mother spent on the floor calling for help, the hospitalization, and the diagnosis before death. The two claims are separate, and depending on how Colorado’s cap regimes apply, the survival damages may not be subject to the same caps as the wrongful death damages.
How much does it cost to hire a wrongful death lawyer?
We work on contingency. That means we do not get paid unless we win your case. The fee is 33.33% of the recovery before trial and 40% if the case goes to trial. The consultation is free. We do not charge for the first conversation, and we do not bill by the hour. If there is no recovery, there is no fee. We serve families in English and in Spanish — Hablamos Español — because every family in Adams County deserves to understand their rights in the language they think in.
Should I accept the facility’s settlement offer?
No family should accept a settlement offer from a care facility’s insurer without consulting a lawyer who has reviewed the complete record. The insurer’s first offer is calculated to be lower than the case’s discovery value — meaning lower than what the case is worth after the video is authenticated, the records are produced, the employees are deposed, and the full scope of the evidence is known. A release signed today closes the case permanently. The evidence you have not yet seen may be worth more than the offer you have received.
Why Attorney911 — and What the First Call Costs
Attorney911 is The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are trial lawyers who take Colorado cases, working with local counsel where required. We do not claim an office in Colorado. We do claim something that matters more: the experience, the training, and the will to build this case the way it deserves to be built.
Ralph Manginello is our Managing Partner — 27+ years licensed, admitted to federal court, a journalist before he was a lawyer, a competitor who hates losing. He has spent his career in courtrooms where the evidence is contested and the stakes are life-and-death. He leads wrongful death and catastrophic injury cases with the same discipline a trial demands: every fact verified, every clock tracked, every record preserved before it can disappear.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney — a former insurance-defense attorney who spent years inside a national defense firm, in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue people exactly like you. He knows how the other side prices a claim, how they select IME doctors, how they engineer recorded statements, and how they use delay as a weapon. Now he uses that knowledge for injured families. He conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter — because the fight should not be harder because of the language you pray in.
We have recovered more than $50 million for our clients — a marketing aggregate, not a guarantee. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we can tell you is this: the education, the governing law, the evidence clocks, and the decision power on this page are the same analysis we would give you on the phone. The call is free. The consultation is confidential. And the first thing we do — the day you call — is send the letter that freezes the evidence before it can legally disappear.
Your mother deserved the care she was promised. The records said she received it. The camera said she did not. That gap is where the law meets the truth — and it is where we go to work.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win. Hablamos Español.