Dale Alice Martin went to the hospital with a broken ankle. She never came home. Now her family is suing Waterbury Hospital in Connecticut, and what the lawsuit alleges reads like a horror story.
The 21-year-old Manhattan native broke her ankle doing farm work near Bethlehem in April 2025 and was taken to the nearest hospital. According to the suit filed by her father, staff gave her so many painkillers that she stopped breathing within 14 hours of being admitted.
“Within 14 hours of admission, providers at the hospital had administered so much pain medication that Dale stopped breathing and later died.”
The lawsuit alleges nobody checked on her during that stretch, and the drugs sedated her so deeply she could not call for help. A nurse found her at 7 a.m. the next morning. Her heart had already stopped. An autopsy determined she died of cardiac arrest after receiving multiple narcotics.
Then there is the hospital itself. At the time, Waterbury Hospital was owned by Prospect Medical Holdings, a California company that had filed for bankruptcy three months earlier. Her father, Lindsay Martin, says the family had no idea what kind of facility she had been taken to.
“We didn’t know till after Dale’s death that she was admitted to a bankrupt hospital that was under investigation.”
Federal investigators later found flaws in how her medication was ordered. The hospital’s later owner declined to comment, and Prospect’s former executives did not respond to questions.
Dale was 21, studying English and history at Trinity University in Texas. She went in for an ankle. Her family says the system failed her at every single step.
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