WSU Student Suicide Lawsuit: Hims & Hers Telehealth Malpractice and Theta Chi Fraternity Hazing Wrongful Death
If you are reading this page, you have lost someone you love — a son, a brother, a friend, a student who had a whole life ahead of him — and you are trying to understand how it happened and who is responsible. You may be a parent who sent a child to Washington State University in Pullman and got the call no parent should ever receive. You may be searching at two in the morning, going through your son’s phone records, his prescriptions, his fraternity communications, trying to piece together a timeline that ends in a death you never saw coming. You are in the right place. We are going to tell you exactly how the law treats this kind of loss — what your family’s rights actually are, what the telehealth company and the fraternity are already doing to protect themselves, what evidence is disappearing right now while you read, and what a case like this is built from. We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, and we handle wrongful-death cases involving corporate negligence and organizational failure. The call is free. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911, any hour, and a real person — not a machine — will pick up.
Can You Sue a Telehealth Company When a Student Dies by Suicide?
Yes — and the answer matters now, because the clock is running. When a telehealth platform like Hims & Hers Health prescribes medication to a patient without conducting an adequate psychiatric assessment, without screening for suicide risk, and without safeguards that a competent psychiatrist would have used in a face-to-face visit, that is not a technology problem. That is medical malpractice. And when a fraternity’s culture or conduct contributed to the student’s deteriorating mental state — through hazing, through pressure, through an environment that a reasonable organization should have known was dangerous — that is organizational negligence. In Washington, both can be pursued in the same wrongful-death lawsuit, and both can be held accountable in the same courtroom. The family of the Washington State University student who died in 2023 did exactly that: they filed a wrongful-death action naming Hims & Hers Health, Inc. and the Theta Chi fraternity, alleging that the telehealth company’s negligent prescription practices and the fraternity’s role in the student’s environment combined to produce a death that was foreseeable and preventable. That is the core of the case. But the question that follows is the one that decides everything: what did each defendant know, when did they know it, and what did they fail to do about it? That question is answered by evidence — and the evidence in this kind of case dies faster than most families realize.
What Washington Law Says About Wrongful Death and Hazing
Washington’s wrongful-death framework gives families a path to hold negligent parties accountable, and the state’s legal landscape is, in several critical respects, more favorable to grieving families than many other states. Three structural facts shape every wrongful-death case filed in Washington, and each one matters to your family’s case.
First, Washington follows a pure comparative negligence rule. Under Washington’s comparative-fault statute, a plaintiff’s recovery is reduced by their percentage of fault — but it is never barred entirely, even if the plaintiff was more than fifty percent at fault. In a suicide wrongful-death case, the defense will try hard to assign fault to the decedent — to argue that the student’s own choices caused his death. Pure comparative negligence means that even if a jury assigned some share of fault to the student, the family’s recovery against the negligent defendants is reduced, not eliminated. Every percentage point the defense tries to pin on the decedent is money, which is exactly why the defense works so hard to shift blame — and exactly why we work harder to keep the focus on what the defendants did and failed to do.
Second, Washington does not cap non-economic damages in wrongful-death cases. The Washington State Supreme Court has found statutory caps on non-economic damages unconstitutional. That means a jury can award the full human value of what was lost — the parent-child relationship, the love, the guidance, the companionship, the life that was ahead of this student — without a legislative ceiling cutting the number down. In a state that does cap these damages, a family might recover enormous economic losses but see the human component of their loss slashed by a cap. In Washington, that ceiling does not exist. This is one of the strongest structural advantages a Washington wrongful-death family has, and it is why the defense fights to minimize the case before it ever reaches a jury.
Third, the wrongful-death action belongs to the personal representative of the estate. Under Washington’s wrongful-death statute, the personal representative of the decedent’s estate may maintain the action for the benefit of the parents or siblings if there are no surviving children or spouse. This means a court appointment has to happen before the lawsuit can be filed — the personal representative is the one person the law authorizes to bring the family’s case. We handle that appointment as part of the work. Meanwhile, the official investigation proceeds, the prescription records sit in databases, the fraternity communications sit on phones — and they must all be preserved before the systems that hold them are allowed to delete them.
There is also a survival action in Washington — a separate claim that belongs to the estate for the pain, suffering, and emotional distress the student experienced between the onset of the defendants’ negligence and the time of death. In a case where a student suffered through worsening mental health, inadequate medical care, and a fraternity environment that contributed to his decline, the survival action captures what he went through before he died. It is a distinct claim from the wrongful-death action, and an attorney who does not plead both is leaving a claim on the table.
Washington’s statute of limitations for wrongful death generally runs three years from the date of death. But that clock can be affected by when the family discovered — or should have discovered — the role the defendants played. In a case where the telehealth company’s negligence was not immediately apparent, and where the fraternity’s conduct may not have been fully known to the family at the time of death, the question of when the clock actually started is one that has to be analyzed carefully and quickly. Three years sounds like a long time. It is not. Evidence disappears in weeks, not years.
The Telehealth Standard of Care: Why “Same as In-Person” Matters
This is where the case against Hims & Hers Health lives or dies, and it is where a generalist lawyer who does not understand telehealth regulation will miss the most important fact in the entire complaint.
Under Washington law, telehealth services are governed by the same standard of care as in-person medical visits — the platform is not a lesser form of medicine, and the doctor behind the screen owes the patient the same duty of care as the doctor in the room.
That is the doctrine, and it is the engine of the malpractice claim. Washington requires that a physician practicing via telehealth meet the same clinical standard as a physician seeing the patient in person. The same assessment. The same screening. The same duty to warn. The same obligation to identify suicide risk factors before prescribing medications that can affect mood, behavior, and impulse control.
The lawsuit alleges that Hims & Hers Health provided prescription medication to the student without adequate medical screening or mental-health safeguards. In practice, what that looks like is a business model that some telehealth platforms have built: a patient fills out an online questionnaire — sometimes in minutes — and an algorithm or a contracted physician reviewing that questionnaire at volume approves a prescription. There may be no structured psychiatric interview. There may be no validated suicide-risk screening tool administered — no PHQ-9, no Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale, no clinical assessment of whether the patient has a history of depression, suicidal ideation, or acute life stressors. There may be no follow-up plan. There may be no warning to the patient or the family about psychiatric side effects of the prescribed medication.
The generalist misses this: when the standard of care is the same as in-person, a questionnaire is not a substitute for a clinical assessment. A prescription generated from an online form without a face-to-face evaluation, without a psychiatric history, without a suicide screen, is not “telemedicine operating at a different standard.” It is malpractice measured against the same standard every other doctor in Washington is held to. That is the whole point of the Washington regulation — the platform does not get a lower duty because it is digital. The duty is identical. And when the duty is identical, the breach is measured against what a competent physician would have done in person — which includes asking about suicidal thoughts before writing a prescription for a medication that can worsen them.
The trial strategy against Hims focuses on this: their business model prioritizes high-volume prescriptions over patient safety. Discovery must target the algorithms the platform uses to “approve” patients — what questions are asked, what answers trigger a prescription, what answers trigger a referral to a higher level of care, and whether the system even has a pathway for identifying and responding to acute suicide risk. The prescribing physician — who may be an independent contractor rather than an employee of the platform — is also a defendant, because the doctor-patient relationship established through the digital platform carries the same standard of care as any other. The question is whether that physician actually met it, or whether the platform’s structure made meeting it impossible.
Sam’s Law and Fraternity Liability for Hazing in Washington
The fraternity angle in this case is not a sideshow. It is a parallel theory of liability that, combined with the telehealth malpractice, tells the story of a student who was failed by two systems that should have protected him.
Washington has its own anti-hazing statute — commonly known as Sam’s Law (HB 1751) — which mandates transparency and reporting of hazing incidents and increases penalties for hazing conduct at institutions of higher education. The law is named for a student who died as a result of hazing, and it was written precisely because the prior regulatory framework was not enough to stop organizations from exposing young people to foreseeable harm. Sam’s Law requires that hazing incidents be reported and increases the consequences for organizations that engage in or tolerate hazing. A violation of this law — if the fraternity engaged in prohibited activities that contributed to the student’s mental-health decline — can serve as the predicate for a negligence-per-se theory, where the violation of the safety statute itself becomes evidence of negligence.
The lawsuit also targets the fraternity for negligence, failure to supervise, and potential violations of Washington’s anti-hazing statute. The theories of liability include the fraternity’s role in creating or tolerating an environment that contributed to the student’s deteriorating mental state. That environment might include hazing rituals, sleep deprivation, alcohol pressure, social isolation, humiliation, or the cumulative psychological weight of an organizational culture that treats new members as expendable. Each of these is a recognized form of psychological harm, and each can contribute to a mental-health crisis in a young person who is already vulnerable.
The national fraternity organization and the local chapter are separate defendants with separate duties. The national organization typically sets the policies, provides the insurance, and controls the risk-management framework. The local chapter implements — or fails to implement — those policies. In a hazing case, the national organization’s liability often turns on what it knew about the local chapter’s culture, what prior incidents it had been notified of, and what it did or failed to do in response. A fraternity that has been put on notice of hazing at a chapter and fails to act has a foreseeability problem — the harm was known, the risk was documented, and the organization chose not to intervene.
The killer takeaway here is what a generalist misses: fraternity insurance policies almost always contain hazing exclusions. The national organization carries a large general-liability policy with riders for fraternal activities, but those riders frequently exclude coverage for hazing, for criminal acts, and for conduct that violates the organization’s own anti-hazing policies. The fraternity’s insurer will argue that hazing is excluded, which means the coverage fight is its own battle — and the family’s lawyer has to know to plead around the exclusion, reach the national organization’s assets directly, and identify every layer of the coverage tower before the insurer argues there is no money to recover. This is where a lawyer who understands corporate-structure analysis earns their fee, and it is where the insurance company is counting on the family’s attorney not knowing the exclusion exists until it is too late.
Who Is Legally Responsible: The Defendant Structure
A wrongful-death case involving a telehealth company and a fraternity has a more complex defendant map than most families expect. Naming the wrong entity — or missing a critical one — can shrink the recovery or sink the case.
Hims & Hers Health, Inc. is a publicly traded corporation (NYSE: HIMS) that operates a telehealth platform connecting patients with contracted physicians who prescribe medications ranging from hair-loss treatments to mental-health medications. The corporate structure matters: the platform entity, the physician-contracting entity, and the pharmacy or fulfillment entity may be separate legal persons. The prescribing physician is typically a contracted independent contractor, not a W-2 employee — which is the telehealth industry’s version of the “independent contractor” shield that rideshare companies and trucking carriers use. But medical malpractice does not require employment. The doctor-patient relationship creates the duty of care regardless of whether the doctor is an employee or a contractor, and the platform’s own role in structuring the encounter — the questionnaire, the algorithm, the approval process — can create direct corporate liability separate from the physician’s individual negligence.
Theta Chi Fraternity operates through a national organization and a local chapter at WSU. The national organization is typically a tax-exempt entity with substantial assets and a large insurance program. The local chapter may be a separate entity — sometimes an unincorporated association, sometimes a local LLC — with far fewer assets. The individual members who participated in hazing or contributed to the dangerous environment are also potential defendants, though their individual assets are usually limited. The strategic question is which entities have the assets and the insurance to satisfy a judgment, and which entities’ conduct is most clearly tied to the harm.
The insurance picture is layered and full of traps. Hims & Hers Health likely carries substantial professional liability — malpractice — insurance, plus cyber and telehealth specialty coverage. Theta Chi’s national organization carries a large general-liability policy with specific riders for fraternal activities, but those riders often contain complex exclusions for hazing or criminal acts — exclusions that the fraternity’s insurer will invoke to try to avoid paying. The prescribing physician carries individual malpractice coverage, which is a separate tower. Finding every policy, in what order they pay, and which ones contain exclusions that the insurer will try to hide behind is half the value of the case. A lawyer who pleads only against the most obvious defendant and never maps the full coverage tower has not done the job.
The Evidence Clock: What Disappears and How Fast
This is the section that decides whether the case can be won. Every piece of evidence in a telehealth-hazing wrongful-death case is on a clock, and some of those clocks run out in days, not months. The evidence-preservation letter goes out the day you call us — not after the insurance company contacts you, not after the funeral, not after you have had time to think about it. The day you call.
Telehealth Portal Logs. The digital record of the student’s interaction with the Hims & Hers platform — the questionnaire answers, the time spent on each screen, whether any suicide-risk screening was administered, what the prescribing physician reviewed, how long the “consultation” lasted, and what warnings were or were not provided — is the single most important document in the malpractice case. These logs are held by the telehealth platform and are subject to the platform’s own data-retention policies. There is no federal statute that forces a telehealth company to keep portal interaction logs indefinitely. Data-retention policies can lead to deletion — and once the logs are gone, the family’s ability to prove what the platform did or did not ask before prescribing is gone with them. Urgency: HIGH. The preservation demand to Hims & Hers must go out immediately and must specifically name the portal interaction data, the prescription approval algorithm records, the physician’s review notes, and all internal communications about the patient.
Prescription History and Packaging. The physical evidence of what was actually dispensed — the medication, the dosage, the packaging, the warning inserts, the pharmacy fulfillment records — establishes exactly what the student received and what warnings accompanied it. This evidence must be secured from the family and the estate before it is discarded. If the medication is still in the student’s possession, it must be photographed, inventoried, and preserved. Urgency: MEDIUM. Physical evidence is more stable than digital, but it can still be lost if the family is not told to keep it.
Fraternity Group Chats. The communications between fraternity members on encrypted platforms — Signal, GroupMe, Discord, text messages — are the proof of hazing culture, knowledge of the student’s deteriorating mental state, and the fraternity’s response or failure to respond. These are CRITICAL — and they are the single most fragile evidence in the case. Students delete these messages immediately following an incident. Group chats vanish. Encrypted messages self-destruct. Photos are removed from shared albums. The moment members realize something has gone wrong, the phones come out and the messages start disappearing. Urgency: CRITICAL. A preservation letter to the fraternity, the national organization, and individual members must go out within days, and forensic imaging of the decedent’s own devices must happen before any data is lost to routine deletion or accidental factory reset.
The Decedent’s Electronic Devices. The student’s phone, laptop, and tablet are the timeline of his mental-health decline and his interactions with both defendants. The phone shows the telehealth app usage, the prescription records, the fraternity communications, the search history, the social-media activity, and the text messages with family and friends. This is not a matter of scrolling through the phone — it requires forensic imaging by a qualified professional who can create a bit-for-bit copy that preserves deleted data, metadata, and timestamps in a form that is admissible in court. Urgency: HIGH. Every day the phone is used, data is overwritten. Every sync, every backup, every app update risks corrupting or overwriting evidence that was there.
When a defendant lets required evidence die after receiving a preservation letter, the law answers. The jury may be instructed to assume the lost record was as bad as the plaintiff says it was — an adverse-inference instruction. The bar for the harshest sanctions is high, but the leverage begins the moment the letter is on file. That is why the letter goes out the day you call, not the month you decide to sue.
What a Hazing Wrongful Death Case Is Worth
The value of a case like this is not a single number pulled from a chart. It is built from several categories of loss, each of which has to be documented and proven to a jury. In Washington, where there is no cap on non-economic damages, the full human cost of the loss can be recovered — and in a case involving a young person with a full life ahead of him, that human cost is enormous.
Economic damages include the loss of the student’s future earning capacity — what he would have earned over a working lifetime, with fringe benefits, adjusted to present value. A forensic economist builds this number from the student’s age, education, career trajectory, and the prevailing wages in his field. Economic damages also include funeral and burial expenses, medical expenses incurred before death, and any other out-of-pocket losses the family has sustained. These are calculable, provable, and uncapped.
Non-economic damages cover what no spreadsheet can price: the loss of the parent-child relationship, the love, the companionship, the guidance the parents would have received from their son over the rest of his life, and the loss of the son’s own experience of life — his enjoyment, his relationships, his future. In Washington, these damages are not capped, which means the jury can award the full amount it finds appropriate, without a legislative ceiling cutting it down. In a case involving the death of a college student — a young person at the beginning of his adult life — the non-economic loss is among the most profound a jury can be asked to value.
Survival damages compensate the estate for the pain, suffering, and emotional distress the student experienced between the onset of the defendants’ negligence and the time of death. If the student suffered through worsening mental health, through a fraternity environment that contributed to his decline, through the failure of a telehealth platform to provide adequate care — that suffering is compensable, and it is separate from the wrongful-death damages.
Punitive damages are generally not available in Washington under common law unless specifically authorized by statute. This makes the maximization of non-economic compensatory damages critical — the full weight of accountability has to be carried by the compensatory award, because the punishment mechanism is largely unavailable.
Based on the case characteristics — a young student’s death, a multi-billion-dollar telehealth corporation, a national fraternity organization, the combination of medical negligence and organizational failure — case values in this category range from approximately $1,500,000 on the low end to $10,000,000 or more on the high end. The high range is driven by the potential for a safety-rule-violation approach against a large corporate defendant for systemic failures in patient screening, combined with the extreme emotional impact of a student suicide on a jury. Every case is different, and the actual value depends on the specific facts, the strength of the evidence, the jurisdiction, and the quality of the legal work. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
The Medicine of Suicide and Foreseeability
The defense in a suicide wrongful-death case always argues the same thing: that suicide is an independent choice, not a foreseeable result of someone else’s negligence. This is the first wall the case has to break through, and the medicine is what breaks it.
Suicide is not a random event. It is the endpoint of a recognizable, diagnosable, and treatable mental-health crisis — and the medical literature on suicide risk assessment is decades deep. The standard of care for any physician prescribing medication that can affect mood — particularly medications that carry FDA warnings about suicidal ideation in young adults — includes a clinical assessment of the patient’s baseline mental health, current stressors, history of depression or suicidal thinking, and acute risk factors. A physician who prescribes without that assessment has not met the standard of care, regardless of whether the prescription is delivered through an app or in a clinic.
The defense will argue that the student had pre-existing mental-health conditions — that the suicide was caused by the student’s own psychiatric history, not by the telehealth platform’s failure to screen or the fraternity’s environment. This is the eggshell-plaintiff doctrine in action: a defendant takes the victim as found. A pre-existing vulnerability that made the student more susceptible to harm does not reduce the defendant’s liability — it can enlarge the damages, because the defendant’s negligence acted on a person who was already at risk and failed to protect him. The family’s attorney who does not know to raise the eggshell doctrine has already conceded the defense’s best argument.
The foreseeability analysis is where the two defendants converge. The telehealth platform’s failure to screen for suicide risk meant that a student who was already struggling — possibly because of the fraternity environment — was given medication without the safeguards that the standard of care requires. The fraternity’s contribution to the student’s mental-health decline created the very vulnerability that the telehealth platform failed to identify and protect against. Together, the two failures produced a death that was foreseeable to anyone who was paying attention — but neither defendant was paying attention, because their business models do not reward attention. They reward volume and speed.
The expert witnesses who make this case are a tele-psychiatrist who can testify to the standard of care for remote prescribing, a pharmacologist who can testify to the psychiatric risks of the specific medications prescribed, and a collegiate organizational-behavior expert who can testify to the recognized patterns of hazing-related psychological harm. These experts are not optional. They are the case.
The Insurance Playbook: What They Do Before the Funeral
The defense in a wrongful-death case involving corporate and organizational defendants does not wait for the lawsuit to start moving. The machinery begins within hours of the death — sometimes before the family has left the hospital. Here is what to expect, and here is how each play is countered.
Play 1: The ” condolences” call. Within days, someone will call the family — possibly from the fraternity’s national organization, possibly from a third-party claims administrator, possibly from a risk-management firm. The caller will express sympathy, offer to help with expenses, and ask the family to “just tell us what happened” — on a recording built to be quoted against them later. This is a recorded statement, and it is engineered to elicit statements that shift blame to the student or to the family. Counter: Do not take the call. Do not give a recorded statement to anyone representing the fraternity, the telehealth company, or their insurers. Every statement the family makes will be transcribed, parsed, and used to minimize the case. The only person who should be talking to these entities is the family’s attorney.
Play 2: The fast check. A check may arrive quickly — sometimes before the medical records are pulled, sometimes before the toxicology results are back, sometimes before the family has had time to think. The check will come with a release attached — a document that, once signed, extinguishes the family’s right to sue in exchange for a fraction of what the case is worth. Counter: Do not sign anything. Do not cash anything. A check that arrives before the family understands the full scope of what happened is not generosity — it is procedure. The insurance company’s own internal guidelines tell adjusters to settle fast and settle cheap before the family hires a lawyer who knows what the case is actually worth.
Play 3: The “pre-existing condition” defense. The defense will scour the student’s medical history, social media, and academic records for any evidence of prior depression, anxiety, treatment, or difficulty — and will use it to argue that the suicide was caused by the student’s own condition, not by the defendants’ negligence. Counter: The eggshell-plaintiff doctrine. A pre-existing mental-health condition does not absolve a defendant of liability. The defendant takes the victim as found. If anything, a known vulnerability makes the failure to screen and protect more egregious, not less. The defense’s attempt to blame the student for his own death is not just legally weak — it is the cruelest play in the playbook, and a jury that hears it often responds with anger, not sympathy for the defense.
Play 4: The hazing exclusion. The fraternity’s insurer will argue that hazing is excluded from coverage, which means the fraternity’s policy does not apply and there is no money to recover from the organization. Counter: The exclusion is not the end of the story. The national organization has assets beyond insurance. The local chapter may have separate coverage. Individual members may have homeowners policies that provide coverage for certain claims. And the fraternity’s own conduct — failing to supervise, failing to enforce its own anti-hazing policies, failing to report under Sam’s Law — may trigger coverage under different policy provisions that the insurer has not pointed out. Mapping every layer of the coverage tower is how this play is beaten, and it is work that starts on day one.
Play 5: The delay. The insurance company will ask for “more time” — more time to investigate, more time to review records, more time to evaluate the claim. The purpose of delay is to run the statute of limitations, to let evidence disappear, and to wear the family down until they accept less. Counter: The preservation letter, the records demands, and the lawsuit itself are the counter to delay. A case that is filed and moving cannot be delayed by the insurer’s calendar.
How We Build the Case: The Proof Story
Here is how a case like this is actually built — week by week, document by document, from the day the family calls to the day a number is put on the table.
Week one. The preservation letter goes out to Hims & Hers Health, Theta Chi fraternity (national and local), the prescribing physician, and every individual whose communications might be relevant. The letter names every category of evidence: portal logs, prescription records, algorithm approval data, internal communications, group chats, incident reports, fraternity policies, prior-hazing complaints, and the student’s medical records. The letter converts automatic deletion into sanctionable destruction. Simultaneously, the decedent’s electronic devices are forensically imaged — a bit-for-bit copy that preserves deleted data and timestamps in a form admissible in court. The death certificate, autopsy report, and toxicology results are requested. The personal representative is appointed by the court.
Weeks two through four. The records come in — or they do not, and the absence itself becomes evidence. The telehealth portal logs show how long the “consultation” lasted and whether any suicide screening was administered. The prescription records show what was dispensed and what warnings accompanied it. The fraternity’s internal communications show what the chapter knew about the student’s condition and what it did or did not do. The forensic image of the phone shows the timeline of the student’s interactions with both defendants. Expert witnesses are retained: a tele-psychiatrist for the standard of care, a pharmacologist for the medication risks, an organizational-behavior expert for the fraternity culture.
Months one through three. Discovery proceeds. The depositions begin. The prescribing physician explains, under oath, what he reviewed before approving the prescription and how long it took. The platform’s safety officer explains the algorithm and the screening protocols. The fraternity’s national representative explains what the organization knew about the local chapter and what prior incidents had been reported. The records that were preserved because the letter went out on day one are the records that win these depositions. The records that were lost because no letter was sent are the records that lose the case.
The number. The number at the end is built from all of it — the medical proof, the corporate failures, the organizational negligence, the expert testimony, the lost earning capacity, the human loss, and the survival damages. It is not a number we pull from a chart. It is a number we build from the ground up, document by document, and it is the number the defense fights hardest to keep off the table.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do Now
If you are the family of a student who has died — whether at WSU or anywhere else, whether involving a telehealth platform or a fraternity or both — here is what matters most in the first hours and days after the loss.
First: Secure the physical evidence. Do not return, discard, or clean out the student’s belongings. His phone, laptop, medications, prescription packaging, fraternity materials, and personal papers are evidence. Photograph everything in place before it is moved. If the medications are still present, photograph the packaging, the labels, the warning inserts, and the remaining pills. Put everything in a secure location and do not allow anyone — including family members who may want to “clean up” — to dispose of anything.
Second: Do not give a recorded statement. If the fraternity calls, if the telehealth company calls, if an insurance adjuster calls, if a “risk manager” calls — do not speak with them. Do not sign anything. Do not accept money. Every word the family says to these entities will be used to minimize the case. The only person who should be communicating with the defense is the family’s attorney.
Third: Request the records immediately. The student’s medical records, the telehealth portal records, the prescription history, the autopsy and toxicology report, the university’s incident records, and any police or coroner reports are all evidence. Some of these are available to the family directly; others require a subpoena or a court order. We handle all of it, but the requests have to go out fast — before retention policies allow the records to be purged.
Fourth: Do not delete anything. Do not delete the student’s social-media accounts. Do not close his email. Do not factory-reset his phone. Do not cancel the telehealth subscription. Every digital artifact is evidence, and once it is deleted, it may be gone forever. The student’s digital life is the timeline of what happened to him, and that timeline is what proves the case.
Fifth: Call us. The call is free. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 at any hour — we have live staff, not an answering service — and we will tell you, plainly and honestly, whether we can help. If we are not the right fit for your family, we will tell you that too. But if your loss involves a telehealth company’s failure to screen, a fraternity’s failure to protect, or the combination of both, we know how to build this case, and we know what the defense is already doing to make it harder.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you sue a telehealth company when someone dies by suicide?
Yes. A telehealth platform that prescribes medication without meeting the standard of care — including adequate psychiatric assessment and suicide-risk screening — can be held liable for wrongful death when that failure contributes to a patient’s suicide. In Washington, the standard of care for telehealth is the same as for in-person care. A questionnaire is not a substitute for a clinical evaluation, and a prescription written without screening for the very risk the medication can worsen is malpractice.
Can a fraternity be sued for hazing that contributes to a student’s death?
Yes. A fraternity — both the national organization and the local chapter — can be held liable for negligence, failure to supervise, and violations of Washington’s anti-hazing law (Sam’s Law, HB 1751) when its conduct or culture contributed to a student’s mental-health decline and death. The national organization’s liability often turns on what it knew about the local chapter’s culture and what it did or failed to do in response.
How long do I have to file a wrongful death lawsuit in Washington?
Washington’s statute of limitations for wrongful death generally runs three years from the date of death, though the clock can be affected by when the family discovered or should have discovered the defendants’ role. Three years sounds like a long time, but the evidence in these cases disappears in days and weeks. The preservation letter and the records demands have to go out immediately — the deadline to sue is not the deadline that matters most. The deadline that matters most is the one on the evidence.
Does Washington cap damages in wrongful death cases?
No. Washington does not have a statutory cap on non-economic damages in personal injury or wrongful death cases — the State Supreme Court has found such caps unconstitutional. A jury can award the full human value of the loss — the parent-child relationship, the love, the companionship, the life that was ahead of this student — without a legislative ceiling. This is one of the strongest structural advantages a Washington wrongful-death family has.
What evidence is needed in a hazing wrongful death case?
The critical evidence includes: the telehealth platform’s portal interaction logs (questionnaire answers, screening records, physician review notes, prescription data), the student’s prescription history and medication packaging, the fraternity’s group communications on Signal/GroupMe/Discord/text, the student’s electronic devices (forensically imaged), the autopsy and toxicology report, the student’s medical and mental-health records, the fraternity’s internal incident reports and prior-hazing complaints, and any university records related to the fraternity. Each of these is on a different destruction clock, and each has to be preserved by letter immediately.
How does comparative negligence work in a Washington wrongful death case?
Washington follows a pure comparative negligence rule. The family’s recovery is reduced by the decedent’s percentage of fault — but it is never entirely barred, even if the decedent was more than fifty percent at fault. In a suicide case, the defense will argue that the student’s own choices caused his death. Pure comparative negligence means that even if a jury assigns some fault to the student, the family still recovers against the negligent defendants for the remaining share. Every percentage point the defense tries to pin on the student is money, which is why the defense works so hard to shift blame.
Can I sue if my loved one had pre-existing mental health issues?
Yes. Under the eggshell-plaintiff doctrine, a defendant takes the victim as found. A pre-existing mental-health condition that made the student more vulnerable does not reduce the defendant’s liability — it can enlarge the damages, because the defendant’s negligence acted on a person who was already at risk. The defense will try to use the student’s psychiatric history to shift blame. The law’s answer is that a vulnerable person is not a person the defendants get to neglect with impunity — a vulnerable person is the person the standard of care exists to protect.
What is the standard of care for telehealth providers in Washington?
Washington law requires that telehealth providers meet the same standard of care as in-person providers. The platform does not get a lower duty because it is digital. The duty is identical: the same assessment, the same screening, the same obligation to identify suicide risk before prescribing medications that can worsen it. A telehealth platform that prescribes without meeting this standard has committed malpractice measured against the same yardstick applied to every other physician in the state.
How much is a wrongful death case worth?
Case values in this category range from approximately $1,500,000 to $10,000,000 or more, depending on the facts, the strength of the evidence, the defendants’ resources, and the jurisdiction. In Washington, where non-economic damages are uncapped, the full human cost of the loss is recoverable. The specific value is built from the medical proof, the corporate failures, the lost earning capacity, the survival damages, and the non-economic loss — not pulled from a chart. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What should I do if the insurance company contacts me?
Do not speak with them. Do not give a recorded statement. Do not sign anything. Do not accept money. Every communication from the insurance company, the fraternity’s national organization, or the telehealth company’s representatives is engineered to minimize the case. The only person who should be communicating with these entities is the family’s attorney. If they call, take their name and number and tell them you will have your attorney contact them — then call us.
Why This Firm: Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, based in Houston, Texas, and we take wrongful-death cases involving corporate negligence and organizational failure wherever they arise. We work with local counsel in Washington and appear pro hac vice where required — we do not claim a Washington office or a Washington bar admission, and we will tell you that plainly. What we bring is twenty-seven years of trial experience, a deep understanding of corporate-structure analysis, and an active hazing litigation practice that makes us uniquely suited to a case involving a fraternity.
Ralph Manginello is the managing partner of this firm. He has been licensed since November 6, 1998 — twenty-seven years in courtrooms, including federal court. He is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which means he knows how to find the story inside the documents — the story the defense does not want a jury to hear. Ralph is currently lead counsel in an active $10 million hazing lawsuit — Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston, pending in Harris County — which means the mechanics of fraternity litigation, the insurance-coverage fights, the national-versus-local defendant structure, and the evidence-preservation challenges of hazing cases are not theoretical to us. We are in that fight right now. The medicine, the corporate-accountability fight, the wrongful-death work — they do not change because the mechanism is new. The live case in front of your family is the bridge.
Lupe Peña is an associate attorney at this firm. He is a former insurance-defense attorney who spent years inside a national defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue people exactly like the reader. Lupe knows how claims are valued from the inside — how the Colossus valuation software works, how reserves are set in the first forty-eight hours, how IME doctors are selected to produce the defense’s preferred opinions, how surveillance and social-media monitoring are deployed, and how delay tactics are used to run the clock. He now uses that knowledge for injured clients. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter.
We work on contingency. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The fee is 33.33% before trial and 40% if the case goes to trial. The consultation is free. The call is free. We have live staff — not an answering service — available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 — that is 1-888-288-9911. We serve families in English and Spanish. Hablamos Español.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. This page is legal information, not legal advice. Contacting the firm is free and confidential. If your family has lost a student to suicide and you believe a telehealth platform or a fraternity contributed to that loss, the most important thing you can do — today, before the evidence disappears — is call.