Relatives win $39.5 million after jury blames healthcare entities for West Philly quadruple killing
Mercy hospitals and Horizon Health failed to submit paperwork that would have prevented Maurice Louis, 35, from buying a gun after he was involuntarily committed 2018, attorneys said.
A Philadelphia jury found a hospital system and a behavioral health management firm responsible for the 2019 murders of four family members by a relative who had been previously diagnosed with schizophrenia, issuing a $39.5 million verdict Tuesday.
When Maurice Louis, 35, was involuntarily committed to Mercy Philadelphia’s psychiatric ward in 2018, Mercy hospitals and Texas-based Horizon Health Management LLC failed to submit paperwork that would have prevented him from obtaining a gun.
And when Louis’ mother, Janet Woodson, took her son to Mercy Fitzgerald in Delaware County the night before the massacre after he stopped taking his medications and behaved erratically, he was not seen by a psychiatrist and was allowed to leave.
The next day, on Oct. 29, 2019, he bought a shotgun and killed 51-year-old Woodson; her husband, 56-year-old Leslie Holmes; and Louis’ two half-brothers, 18-year-old Sy-eed Woodson and 7-year-old Leslie Woodson, in their West Philadelphia home.
Louis pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in 2023 and was sentenced to 40 to 80 years in prison.
An Inquirer investigation in the aftermath of the murders found that Mercy Fitzgerald did not have documentation that Louis had been evaluated by the psychiatric crisis center at the hospital. On the night before the killings, Louis told a nurse that he did not have suicidal thoughts and was not interested in talking to a psychiatrist. The hospital record notes the on-call psychiatrist, who did not see Louis, said to “let him go.”
The jury awarded $9.5 million in compensatory damages and $30 million in punitive damages. Mercy settled the case before trial for an undisclosed sum, so it will not need to pay its share of the verdict. Horizon, which Mercy contracted to support its mental-health programs, is on the hook for over $18 million.
Neither Trinity Mid-Atlantic, owner of Mercy Philadelphia (which has since closed) and Mercy Fitzgerald, nor the attorney for Horizon responded to a request for comment.
» READ MORE: Mother sought help for son a day before he allegedly killed his family in West Philly
At the onset of the two-week trial in Common Pleas Court, Horizon’s attorney, William Mahoney of Stradley Ronon, attempted to cast the blame on Mercy. Hospital staff should have submitted the gun form in 2018, and hospital staff cleared Louis the night before the killings.
“It was the hospital that failed to deliver proper care to Mr. Louis, not Horizon,” Mahoney told the jurors in his opening argument, according to court transcripts.
Horizon was connected to the events only through a 2016 service agreement to assist Mercy in the operation of hospital programs “in a purely administrative capacity,” Mahoney said.
But the failure by Mercy that led to the tragedy was not one of personnel, Jeffrey Goodman, a Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky attorney who represented the estates of Janet Woodson and Sy-eed Woodson, told jurors, according to court transcripts.
“This was a failure of the program, program with a capital P, that Horizon created, managed, and implemented,” the attorney said.
The sad irony is that Horizon was brought in to help Mercy improve its behavioral health services, but it was while the company was under contract that the gun paperwork was not submitted and Louis was let go without seeing a psychiatrist, said Colin Burke of Kline & Specter, who represented the estates of Leslie Holmes and Leslie Woodson.
“Their fingerprints are all over every aspect of the psychiatric services provided by these two hospitals,” he said following the verdict.