In wrongful death suit, family of Brandeis student sues school alleging negligence by campus police

Brandeis student Eli T. Stuart (right) and their siblings.Stuart Family

The family of a Brandeis University student who died last December after changing their mind about taking their own life and crying out for help is suing the school and three public safety officers, alleging they did not properly respond to a call from a passerby for hours.

The wrongful death suit, filed Thursday in Middlesex Superior Court, details the final hours of Eli T. Stuart, a 20-year-old sophomore from Texas who was actively suicidal during an overnight period in early December, ingesting pills, and lying on a patch of frigid ground on campus before deciding they wanted to live. Stuart used they/them pronouns.

But Stuart’s body was found almost 11 hours after a professor called the university’s public safety force reporting someone was conscious and lying on the ground in a wooded area, according to the lawsuit.

“Brandeis University and its safety office failed Eli Stuart in almost every way possible,” said Howard M. Cooper, an attorney representing Stuart’s family. “Eli should be alive today.”

The lawsuit also alleged Stuart’s phone had recorded the student’s cries for help, but said the Waltham institution and its officers left Stuart to “die alone and in agony for hours while crying out for help and making clear they did not want to die.”

In a statement Thursday, Brandeis did not directly respond to the family’s allegations, saying instead that Stuart was “a beloved member of the Brandeis community and their loss was felt deeply on campus.”

The school also noted it employs “caring, skilled, and devoted professionals who support our students every day,” and makes “multi-disciplinary safety resources available to all members of the community.”

The suit names the university, two of its university police officers, and a university police lieutenant detective as defendants.

Stuart had struggled with anxiety and depression and experienced suicidal thoughts throughout high school, according to the family’s lawsuit, and those struggles continued at Brandeis, where Stuart was a neuroscience major.

Suicidal ideation is a major mental health challenge among American youth, one that campuses across the country have had to respond to with increasing urgency in recent years. Each year, about 24,000 college students attempt suicide, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and about 1,100 students do not survive their crisis, making suicide the second-leading cause of death among American college students.

The litigation notes that in fall of 2023, Stuart was experiencing “increasing anxiety,” reflecting in a journal they were feeling “overly anxious” and “drowning in school.” Focusing became difficult because of their depression, according to the complaint.

On Dec. 4, Stuart decided to die by suicide, after they believed they failed a test, according to the suit. They left their dorm early the next morning and at some point took “various prescription and over the counter medications,” according to the complaint.

They walked to a lines of trees next to the Three Chapels on Brandeis’s campus.

“Eli wrote a series of texts to their loved ones and, at 5:29 am, began to audio record what they intended to be the period of time prior to their death,” read the suit. The phone ended up recording for more than 11 hours, capturing “Eli’s last conscious hours as well as recorded their breath sounds even after they had stopped speaking.”

The recording shows that Stuart changed their mind about ending their life, according to the suit. Shortly after 8:30 a.m., Stuart begins to shout for help, yelling they are in trouble and cannot move, and pleading for aid from the school’s student-run volunteer emergency medical service.

“Eli cries out many times for approximately the next 48 minutes,” read the complaint. “Their last plea for help took place at approximately 9:17 am.”

The suit alleges that a professor called campus police shortly before 9:10 a.m. on Dec. 5 to report a “human being lying in the woods.” The professor reported the person was moving their hands and noted the location was “kind of a strange area to be lying in.”

Officer Kimberly Carter, a patrol officer in charge of the day shift that day and one of the defendants in the suit, told the professor the department would take a look, while speculating that it could have been a homeless person, according to the litigation. But Carter did not note the professor’s report in the dispatch log, despite being required by state law to do so, the suit alleges.

She told her colleague, Officer Thomas Espada, another defendant in the suit, about the call, but he didn’t log it either, according to the suit.

The suit alleges Carter failed to respond to the report in a timely manner, waiting more than an hour before taking any action.

“Had she done so, she literally would have heard Eli’s cries for help,” read the complaint.

The complaint cites the university’s internal investigation in asserting that video shows that shortly after 10:15 a.m., Carter drove a police car down a road that did not pass the location identified by the professor. Carter, according to the complaint, “never got out of or even stopped her car, instead merely driving down the road and then driving away.”

Carter then reported to Espada that there was no one lying in the woods, the complaint alleges. Shortly before noon, less than two hours after Carter drove down the wrong road, according to the suit, Stuart’s mother, Alice, called Brandeis police to report that Stuart was missing. She told Espada that Stuart’s roommate had contacted her and thought Eli might have harmed themselves.

But the suit alleges Espada and Carter failed to connect the mother’s call with the earlier report of someone lying in the woods, and because the professor’s report was not logged, “no one searching for Eli knew of that earlier call.”

At about 1:40 p.m., Brandeis police began searching for Stuart by pinging their cellphone. Around 5 p.m., campus police requested a police dog to help with the search. At about 8 p.m., a state trooper found Stuart’s body lying in the marshy, wooded area near the Harlan Chapel, “a few feet from the tree line, precisely where the Professor had reported seeing a human being lying on the ground,” the lawsuit alleges. Stuart was pronounced dead at a local hospital shortly before 10:15 p.m.

The suit describes Stuart as an advocate for people with disabilities and the LGBTQ+ community. In 2020, Stuart spoke at the Texas State Capitol and voiced “their opposition to the Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council’s rule change that allowed social workers to turn down clients on the basis of their disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity,” according to the litigation.

They founded a disability education nonprofit and were a plaintiff in a complaint that alleged the Austin School District failed to perform federally mandated assessments for individualized education plans amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Texas, Stuart was involved in a youth theater group, served on the board of their synagogue’s youth group and “were described as instrumental in keeping the youth group active throughout the COVID lockdown,” according to the suit.

The suit includes a number of counts, including ones charging wrongful death and negligent, as well as intentional, infliction of emotional distress. The plaintiffs are seeking a trial and damages, but moreover, Stuart’s family wants to ensure that “nothing like this ever happens again” on any college campus, said Cooper, their attorney.

“The various failures here were just compiled, one after another after another,” he said.