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Family of Brandeis student who died on campus allege school police negligently responded to call for help
Eli Stuart, a sophomore at the Waltham school from Texas, died after lying near the woods for more than 12 hours, according to the lawsuit.
This story includes information about a person’s suicide. If you are in crisis, you can call, text, or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
The family of a 20-year-old Brandeis University student who died by suicide last winter is suing for more than $10 million, claiming the university police failed to log and correctly follow up on a call reporting the student’s location as they were dying.
The lawsuit, filed in Middlesex Superior Court Thursday, claims university police acted negligently when they failed to log and adequately respond to a call reporting a person lying near the woods on campus. The student, who recorded their final hours, called for help for nearly an hour, the complaint alleges.
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Eli Stuart, a sophomore at the Waltham school from Texas, decided to take their own life on Dec. 4, 2023, according to the wrongful death suit.
Around 4 a.m. on Dec. 5, Stuart went to the tree line near the Three Chapels on Brandeis’s campus. The lawsuit says by this time, Stuart had ingested multiple medications and began an audio recording, which continued for more than 11 hours.
Several hours into the recording, Stuart begins yelling for help and continues for more than 45 minutes, according to the lawsuit. The recording ends around 4:19 p.m., but “Eli lived for many hours after that into the evening,” the suit says.
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Ina statement, Brandeis did not acknowledge the family’s claims and offered their sympathies to Stuart’s family. Instead, a spokesperson said the university offers robust support for students.
“Nothing is more important to Brandeis than the safety and security of our students,” the statement said, in part. “Consistent with best practices in higher education, Brandeis has multi-disciplinary safety resources available to all members of the community.”
Professor calls campus police, who didn’t log call, delayed responding
The suit names Brandeis and three members of the university’s police department as defendants, including officers Kimberly Carter and Thomas Espada. When Espada briefly stepped away from dispatch duties, Carter took a call from a professor who reported a “human being lying in the woods” around 9 a.m.
The suit claims the professor gave a detailed description of the person’s location, said they were moving their hands, and reiterated that the location was “kind of a strange area to be lying in” on a winter morning.
“Officer Carter openly dismissed the Professor’s concerns,” and indicated that “the human being lying on the ground moving ‘could be one of our homeless people, we have had several of them around there,’” the suit claims.
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Carter allegedly didn’t make a note of the call, and neither did Espada when she informed him of the call. Around the time of the call, Stuart would have been calling out for help, the suit posits.
About an hour after the call from the professor, Carter then drove to look for the person. She allegedly traveled down a road that she had previously discussed with the professor as not the correct location. She didn’t get out of her car or stop her car, the suit alleges.
“Their failure to log the events they had been a part of was inexplicably negligent and proved deadly for Eli,” the suit alleges. When Stuart’s mother calls around noon with concerns about Stuart’s wellbeing, both Espada and Carter didn’t connect the report of a person in the woods with the call.
According to the lawsuit, the officers did not connect the call with Stuart’s death until the next day. Carter told her supervisor that she “knew she f– up and felt awful and she wanted to take her one day suspension,” according to an internal affairs investigation report filed with the lawsuit. The investigation called Carter’s response to the professor’s call “callous and unprofessional.”
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“Officer Carter’s and Officer Espada’s failure to take the seconds necessary to create a log entry tragically and significantly delayed the time it took to find Eli and to begin providing life saving measures but for which Eli would have been saved,” the lawsuit reads.
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