The Anderson family have won millions in damages since the 2013 tragedy
The family of Wisconsin teenager Jake Anderson are still reeling from his specious death 12 years later.
Several days before Christmas of 2013, the University of Minnesota student walked his friends home after an ‘Ugly Sweater Party’ and would later be discovered slumped over next to the Mississippi River’s Stone Arch Bridge by a local amateur photographer.
Called out to the scene in frostbitten weather conditions reaching 15 degrees below zero, paramedics declared the 19-year-old ‘obviously dead’ after a first responder failed to locate his pulse.
This terminology is typically attachable to bodies that have been mauled by an animal or struck by a train, while their determination was based on a ‘virtual assessment’ from 15 feet away. At no point did anybody try to warm his hypothermic body up, even though in medical parlance people are “not dead until they are warm and dead”.
Tragically, Anderson was still alive at the time of his body’s discovery – just a slowing down of the breathing and heart rate had occurred – yet he was transported to the morgue and would die there.
His heartbroken mother Kristi told The Minnesota Star Tribune: “We were wronged by so many entities in this endeavour. They left him laying on the pile of rocks where they found him and didn’t even give him a fighting chance to survive.”
“He laid there in zero-degree weather for three hours,” added his father Bill.
Last month, the Andersons were finally awarded £4.8 ($6.4) million in damages, although the ruling didn’t hold the first responders accountable for their boy’s death. Instead, their claim was won against their ex-attorney Robert Hopper, who they’d originally hired to fight a wrongful death lawsuit.
Hennepin County Judge Edward Wahl decided that were it not for Hopper’s legal malpractice, the parents “would have been successful in the underlying wrongful death action” they planned to sue.
