A Nassau County jury has awarded $5.5 million to the family of Lucy Riker, a 91-year-old Franklin Square woman who fractured her hip in a fall at Townhouse Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Uniondale, New York, and died weeks later. Her daughters say she fell after ringing a call bell that no one answered. It is the second $5.5 million verdict against the same facility this year; the first, in July, involved a woman whose death was linked to a bedsore she developed there.
An unanswered call bell is one of the most common starting points for a nursing home fall. A resident who needs help to the bathroom, and who has been told not to get up alone, faces a choice when nobody comes: soil herself or try to make it on her own. Families in these cases routinely describe the same pattern this family did — long waits, too few aides on the floor, and relatives quietly doing the work of staff themselves.
For a 91-year-old, a hip fracture is often not a survivable injury in the long run. Surgery, delirium, and rapid decline in the weeks that follow are a well-documented sequence. That is why fall prevention for a high-risk resident is not a courtesy. It is the care plan: how many staff are needed, how quickly calls are answered, and what happens overnight when staffing is thinnest.
The earlier verdict against the same facility, over a fatal bedsore, points to the other side of the same problem. Pressure injuries and falls are both products of the same thing — whether enough trained people are on the floor to turn, reposition, toilet, and respond to residents who cannot do those things for themselves.
What stands out in this case is how much of it the family saw with their own eyes. Daughters who visit every day are often the best witnesses a resident has. They know when the call bell rings unanswered, when a brief has not been changed overnight, and when pain medication is late. Their observations, written down at the time with dates and names, can matter as much as anything in the chart.
Juries also appear increasingly willing to treat understaffing not as a background condition but as a cause — and, in this case, as grounds for punitive damages. When the same facility faces two major verdicts in one year, one over a fall and one over a bedsore, families elsewhere should take the lesson seriously: when care feels thin, it usually is, and the consequences arrive fast.
If your loved one was injured or died after a fall or pressure injury in a nursing home, Bedsore.Law can help you understand what happened. Call 844-407-6737 or visit bedsore.law/contact for a free, confidential consultation.
