Dale Alice Martin’s Family Files Lawsuit After Hospital Death

Dale Alice Martin went to Waterbury Hospital in Connecticut on April 10, 2025, for treatment of a broken ankle she fractured while doing farm work, but the 21-year-old college student died within hours after receiving a lethal cocktail of painkillers that caused cardiac arrest, according to a lawsuit filed by her family and reported by the Hartford Courant.

The Fatal Administration of Pain Medication

Providers at the facility administered multiple painkillers within 14 hours of admission, according to court documents filed by family attorney Christopher Mattei. The lawsuit states that staff gave the student so much medication that she stopped breathing while the sedating drugs prevented her from calling for help. A nurse finally checked on the patient at 7 a.m. on April 10, but her heart had already stopped beating, according to the suit.

A Bankrupt Facility Under Federal Scrutiny

The victim’s father, Lindsay Martin, stated that his daughter was admitted to a bankrupt hospital under investigation where funding was constrained and nurses were allegedly buying food for patients. The facility was owned at the time by California-based Prospect Medical Holdings, a company that filed for bankruptcy in January 2025 before Hartford HealthCare bought the struggling hospital and two others.

What we expect to find is that this was a hospital that was largely operating on fumes as a result of Prospect dismantling infrastructure within the hospital, reducing staff, training, and finding every way possible to extract value out of the hospital in a way that jeopardized care.

Christopher Mattei

Pending Legal Proceedings and Hospital Response

The family filed a wrongful death lawsuit seeking accountability for the collapse in patient care. A representative for Waterbury Hospital declined to comment on the litigation because the death occurred prior to the facility’s acquisition by Hartford HealthCare. Former Prospect CEOs David Topper and Von Crockett did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment on the lawsuit, according to WNBC-TV News.