Suit over suicidal killer will be refiled
Attorney targets doctor, counselor in woman’s 2013 murder-suicide.
WEST PALM BEACH — An attorney headed back to the drawing board this week to retool what he described as a $50 million lawsuit against a psychiatrist and a therapist on allegations that they failed to properly treat a disturbed West Palm Beach woman who fatally stabbed her 10-year-old daughter and took her own life two years ago.
Conceding he hadn’t followed proper procedures before filing the lawsuit over the 2013 murder-suicide of Pamela Brooks and her daughter, Alexandra, attorney Glenn Crickenberger agreed this week to drop litigation against psychiatrist Dr. Mark Agresti and substance-abuse counselor David Dashev, but said he also would be sending them letters alerting them of his intention to sue them.
Under Florida law, there are special procedures attorneys must follow before filing medical malpractice lawsuits.
In addition to warning letters, they must send the targets of a lawsuit a list of all the
health-care providers the person was seeing and get a qualified expert to say that treatment was below par.
“Our position is that the facts of this case are so blatantly obvious that I can get a half-dozen doctors to say they violated the standard of care,” said Crickenberger, who works in the law firm of famed Stuart attorney Willie Gary.
A new lawsuit will be filed within 45 days and will pass legal muster, Crickenberger said.
Even before he realized he hadn’t followed the rules, which state lawmakers said they created to protect doctors from frivolous litigation, Crickenberger said he planned to amend the lawsuit he filed in April.
In the lawsuit he agreed to drop this week, Crickenberger was suing Agresti and Dashev on the claim they were negligent in the deaths of Pamela and Alexandra Brooks.
In the new lawsuit, he said he also plans to accuse them of intentionally inflicting emotional distress on Bradley Brooks.
He said he wants Bradley Brooks to explain to a jury the horror of stopping by his ex-wife’s home to pick up his daughter only to find her bloody, lifeless body in the kitchen and the body of his ex-wife, who died from 130 self-inflicted stab wounds, lying nearby.
While attorneys representing Agresti and Dashev didn’t return phone calls, they indicated in court papers that it will be difficult for Crickenberger to hold their clients responsible for the tragic deaths.
Florida courts have been loath to hold doctors responsible for suicides by patients they are treat- ing outside mental-health facilities, wrote attorney Jonathan Abel, who represents Agresti.
At the time of the murder-suicide, Brooks was seeing Agresti and Dashev as part of a court-ordered 90-day outpatient treatment program.
While she initially did well, participating in counseling and taking the drug Antabuse, she appeared to have again succumbed to her longstanding addiction to alcohol in the month before her death, according to Crickenberger’s lawsuit.
She was given electrical stimulation and prescribed Prozac for anxiety and depression. She was warned about suicid- al thoughts, he wrote.
But, Abel said, that isn’t enough to prove Agresti did anything wrong.
“That he discussed with her the risk of increased suicidal thinking on Prozac are insufficient to show that Dr. Agresti or any mental health provider should have known that Ms. Brooks was going to stab herself and her daughter,” Abel wrote.
Dashev’s attorney, Craig Glasser, wrote that his client isn’t a doctor and therefore he can’t be sued under the state’s medical malpractice law.
But Crickenberger said he can be sued for simple negligence because he was treating Brooks.