Mother sues Tucson-area rehab center over son’s death

The family of a 20-year-old East Coast man who died of drug toxicity while he was a patient at Sierra Tucson is suing the upscale rehab center.

The young man was found unresponsive at 8:45 a.m. on April 13, 2014. He died two days later. His mother filed a lawsuit this week in Pima County Superior Court citing wrongful death.

An autopsy report said it was unclear whether the death was intentional or accidental.

Officials with Sierra Tucson, which is a for-profit facility north of Tucson, did not respond to a request for comment and a lawyer for the patient’s family did not return a phone call Thursday.

Sierra Tucson is owned by Tennessee-based Acadia Healthcare and sits on 160 acres at 39580 S. Lago del Oro Parkway, on the Pinal-Pima County border.

It has programs to help patients with addictions, mood disorders, chronic pain, eating disorders and trauma through its “Sierra Model” of integrating therapies such as massage, yoga and acupuncture with traditional psychiatry. Most patients are in their late 30s and early 40s. A majority of patients self-pay at a cost of about $1,300 per day.

The legal action says the man’s death is a “direct result” of Sierra Tucson’s failures and that his death has caused, and will forever cause, injury and damage to his mother.

The lawsuit does not ask for a specific amount of money but rather, “damages as it deems fair and just with reference to the injuries resulting from the death.”

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A 2014 state report into the young man’s death found problems with the facility’s pharmacy services, and found that staff members did not adequately check on his vital signs or follow the facility’s suicide assessment protocol.

The state report did not describe precisely how the 5-foot, 8-inch, 162-pound man acquired a toxic level of drugs in his system while in treatment.

An autopsy report listed a combination of diazepam (Valium), nordiazepam (metabolized diazepam), chlordiazepoxide (Librium) and the muscle relaxant cyclobenzaprine (Flexeril) as the cause of death.

Late in 2015, another family filed a lawsuit over a patient’s death at Sierra Tucson.

Richard Lecce, 55, died on Jan. 23, 2015, nearly three weeks into his stay at Sierra Tucson. He hanged himself with a belt in his room and was found close to death at 12:41 p.m., an autopsy and subsequent state investigation showed. He was pronounced dead at 1:13 p.m.

That lawsuit, also filed in Pima County Superior Court, said Lecce’s death was part of a “much larger, ongoing pattern of negligence and conscious disregard of substantial risk of catastrophic harm to a very vulnerable population, their own patients and their families.”

Five Sierra Tucson patients have died since 2011, all of them men, who ranged in age from 20 to 71. Autopsy reports concluded three of the patients died of suicide. The lawsuit also cites a sixth patient, who drowned in Sierra Tucson’s swimming pool in 2006. That man’s family sued and the case was settled out of court.