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POST decertifies former Brandeis officer accused of negligence in student’s 2023 death
Kimberly Carter is accused of mishandling a report of someone lying in the woods where sophomore Eli Stuart was ultimately found unresponsive hours later.
Massachusetts police oversight officials have permanently decertified a former Brandeis University officer named in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of a student who died by suicide on campus in 2023.
Kimberly Carter is accused of brushing off a call reporting “a human being lying in the woods” near the university’s three chapels — the same area where sophomore Eli Stuart was found unresponsive hours later on Dec. 5, 2023.
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Carter, a 22-year veteran of the Brandeis police force, resigned the following week. In an April 16 order from the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, she agreed to permanently give up her certification and forfeit the ability to work as a police officer in Massachusetts.
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Her attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. In a 2025 court filing, however, they argued Carter did not have a legal duty to prevent Stuart’s death given the limited information available to her at the time.
“Not a day has passed since the tragic death by suicide of Brandeis sophomore Eli Stuart,” when Carter “has not reflected on whether she could have done more in response to a call about a person in the woods,” her lawyers wrote. “Eli’s death is a profound and heartbreaking loss.”
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According to their family’s lawsuit, Stuart, 20, experienced worsening anxiety and depression in the fall of 2023 and decided to attempt suicide after believing they had failed a test. In the early hours of Dec. 5, Stuart “took various prescription and over the counter medications,” walked to the tree line near the three chapels, lied down, and texted their loved ones, the lawsuit states.
Stuart also started an audio recording that would continue for more than 11 hours.
“Eli’s recording is horrific in reflecting the fact that they changed their mind about wanting to die and desperately called out for help in order to live,” the complaint states.
Yet when an adjunct professor called campus police shortly after 9 a.m. to say he’d seen a person lying conscious in the woods, Carter allegedly failed to take the report seriously.
“Instead, she responded to him dismissively stating that the person he was observing was likely a homeless person, as though the life of a homeless person somehow did not matter,” the lawsuit states.
More than an hour later, Carter drove a loop around campus and allegedly stopped to check the wrong area, even though the professor had specifically told her it was incorrect. She didn’t get out of the patrol car to look around, the complaint alleges.
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The family also says Brandeis police didn’t document the professor’s call correctly. Consequently, when Stuart’s mother phoned police around noon to report Stuart missing, officers didn’t initially connect her call with the earlier report about a person in the woods.
Carter later told a superior she had “f—ed up,” according to the lawsuit, and an internal Brandeis probe determined there was “a serious dereliction of duty and a failure to act with the prudence that a reasonable person would exercise under the same conditions.”
Brandeis and the officers named in the lawsuit “left Eli to die alone and in agony for hours while crying out for help and making clear they did not want to die,” the student’s family alleges. “If Defendants had timely acted, Eli would have lived.”
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