A Superior Court Held that Colleges and Universities Must Protect Students from Harm. How Does This Help Students Who Are Suicidal?

In a 2021-2022 survey of students across 133 colleges and universities, 44% reported symptoms of depression, and 15% reported seriously considering suicide in the past year. Around that same time, experts estimated that approximately 1,100 college students died by suicide annually. 

Unfortunately, at the same time in young adults’ lives when mental health struggles can appear and/or increase in severity, those young adults are often in college away from their homes and families. Additionally, as we have previously discussed, while colleges and universities have significant legal relationships with students, their duties with respect to students experiencing mental health issues have historically been limited by Massachusetts courts. 

For example, in 2018, in Dzung Duy Nguyen v. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) held that, “[w]here a university has actual knowledge of . . . a student’s stated plans or intentions to commit suicide, the university has a duty to take reasonable measures under the circumstances to protect the student from self-harm.” Yet, this decision does not impose any duty on a college or university that has more general knowledge of a student’s suicidality, such as knowledge of a student’s depression. In Nguyen, that line of reasoning resulted in the SJC holding that Massachusetts Institute of Technology had no duty to protect a student who died by suicide because that student “never communicated by words or actions to any MIT employee that he had stated plans or intentions to commit suicide.” Also relevant to this holding were the facts that Nguyen was a twenty-five-year-old graduate student living off campus rather than “a young student living in a campus dormitory under daily observation,” and that Nguyen repeatedly expressed that he wanted to keep his mental health struggles separate from his academic life. 

Two years later in Helfman v. Northeastern University, 485 Mass. 308 (2020), however, the SJC held that, once a defendant school learns facts that would lead a reasonable person to believe that a student of that school was in imminent danger of serious harm and incapable of seeking help, the school has a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent that harm to the student. At that point when the school has specific knowledge of a student in danger, the SJC reasoned that the school must act pursuant to the special relationship it has with its students. 

The events giving rise to the most recent case addressing this duty—Stuart v. Brandeis opinion on Mot Judgment Pleadings—occurred in December 2023 when a Brandeis University student, Eli Stuart, died by suicide. At approximately 4 a.m., Stuart took a variety of pills, went to a wooded area on campus, and proceeded to record audio for over eleven hours. Between 8:31 a.m. and 9:17 a.m., Stuart can be heard changing their mind and yelling for help. Later, Stuart stopped talking, although they can be heard breathing until the audio stopped recording around 4 p.m. 

At approximately 9:08 a.m., a Brandeis professor called campus police to report a person lying on the ground in that wooded area. Over an hour after that phone call, at approximately 10:16 a.m., a police officer drove by the wooded area but did not stop her vehicle or get out to search. 

Around two hours after that, at approximately 11:59 a.m., Stuart’s mother called campus police and told them that she had received a concerned call from Stuart’s roommate, that Stuart’s location tracker on their phone was off, that she had received a sweet text message from Stuart early that morning that was out of the ordinary, and that Stuart had attempted suicide in the past. In response to this call, the campus police requested the data for Stuart’s University-issued swipe card, which showed that Stuart had not swiped into any buildings since entering their dorm room the previous night. 

Almost two hours after receiving that call from Stuart’s mother, and almost ten hours after Stuart left their dorm room, campus police finally began searching for Stuart at approximately 1:40 p.m. using pings from Stuart’s cell phone. Approximately three hours later, at 4:53 p.m., campus police found Stuart’s body. 

Stuart’s parents subsequently brought a wrongful death suit against Brandeis and the campus police officers involved in the search for Stuart. The defendants moved for judgment on the pleadings, arguing that they owed no duty of care to Stuart under Nguyen. 

The judge in Stuart found that Helfman, not Nguyen, set out the school’s duties in this case. Accordingly, while Brandeis did not have to anticipate and take steps to protect Stuart from a harm that it had no advance knowledge of, it likely did have a duty to act after receiving a call regarding a person lying on the ground in a wooded area and then learning that Stuart’s mother was concerned about her child’s possible suicidality that day. At that point, the court held, Brandeis had learned facts that would lead a reasonable person to believe that its student was in imminent danger of serious harm and incapable of seeking help, and it therefore had a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent that harm to the student. 

The court also rejected Brandeis’s additional argument that it had no duty to act if it was not specifically informed that the person lying on the ground in the woods was a student, finding that the information Brandeis did have was enough to infer that the person was “quite possibly” a student. 

In Helfman, the SJC made clear that colleges and universities have affirmative duties to act when they know their students are in imminent danger, regardless of how the students end up in such danger. The Stuart decision reaffirms this duty, and hopefully impresses upon colleges and universities the need to act to protect their students. Such action is a step in the right direction that will save students’ lives and make colleges and universities safer places. 

If you or your child has concerns about their treatment by their college or university, fill out our online intake form or call us at (617) 742-6020 to be connected with one of our lawyers. 

* Our blogs are written by the firm’s attorneys, without the use of AI or ghostwriters