On Oct. 31 at 10:32 a.m., a “wrongful death lawsuit” concerning “Eli T. Stuart, a 20-year-old student who died in December 2023” was filed in the Superior Court in Middlesex County. This lawsuit named Brandeis University, former Brandeis Police Officer Kimberly Carter, Brandeis Police Officer Thomas Espada and Brandeis Police Lieutenant Detective Dana Kelley as defendants. Stuart’s family, as administrators of their estate, are named as the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit alleges that Brandeis University police officers “failed to urgently respond to calls for help,” also stating that “former Brandeis Police Officer Kimberly Carter, and Brandeis Police Officer Thomas Espada ‘were grossly negligent’ in failing to respond to a phone call from a professor, who was exiting a building on campus and saw Stuart alive but on the ground, but ‘in obvious need of help.’” In a statement provided to Boston 25 News, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Howard M. Cooper of Todd & Welp LLP, added that “Brandeis University and its police officers failed to act despite clear and unambiguous warnings that Eli was in trouble. Eli should still be with their family.”
In a copy of the lawsuit obtained by Boston 25 News, Stuart was described as “an active member in their community” who advocated for LGBTQ+ and disability rights in their home state of Texas. The lawsuit also speaks of their many accomplishments, including speaking at the Texas State Capitol against behavioral health policies that discrimiated against LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities, serving as a plaintiff in a complaint filed against the Texas Education Agency over students not being able to receive accommodations and learning plans and founding a disability education group called Actively Tired. Described in the lawsuit as a “bright, compassionate and driven person,” Stuart aspired to work in the field of neuroscience and “conduct research into the neurological connections between physical and emotional pain.”
In Jan. 2023, Stuart began studying at Brandeis as a Neuroscience major. According to the lawsuit, during the fall of 2023, they “began to feel increasing pressure from school” and “became distressed and found themselves distracted in classes and unable to focus due to their depression.” The lawsuit continues, “[o]n December 4th, 2023 … Eli made the decision to attempt to end their life.”
At 4:03 a.m. on the next day, Dec. 5, Stuart took “various prescriptions and over the counter medications” and walked into the treeline near the Berlin, Harlan and Bethlehem Chapels. There, the lawsuit adds, “at 5:29 AM, [Stuart] began to audio record what they intended to be the period of time prior to their death.” However, Stuart’s phone inadvertently “recorded for the next 11 hours and 24 minutes, until approximately 4:53 PM.”
According to the lawsuit, “Eli’s recording is horrific in the fact that they changed their mind about wanting to die and desperately called out to help in order to live.” A transcript of the recording included with the lawsuit showed that cries for help could be heard until about 9:17 a.m.
According to an internal Brandeis Police report cited in the lawsuit, on that morning, there were two police officers at the Brandeis Police Dispatch Center, Officer Carter and Officer Espada. Carter had been with the Brandeis Police for 22 years, and Espada for 20 years at the time of the incident. According to the MA POST Sustained Allegations and Disciplinary Actions database, Carter had received a suspension of between one and five days for two counts of sexual harrassment in March 2020. No previous allegations were recorded in the database for Officer Espada.
On that morning, Espada had been handling dispatch responsibilities. However, at 9:00 a.m., “Officer Carter took over dispatch responsibilities so that Officer Espada could assist someone in moving a desk from one room to another.” While Carter was on duty, at 9:08 a.m., she received a call from an unnamed Brandeis professor. The professor “reported that he saw ‘a human being lying in the woods’” and that “the individual was moving their hands, was dressed in black, and was lying down on the ground.”
Allegedly, Carter “openly dismissed the Professor’s concerns,” stating that the person “‘could be one of our homeless people, we have had several of them around here.’” After promising that she would “take a look,” Carter ended the call, which had lasted just over two minutes. Neither Carter nor Espada, whom Carter told about the call when he returned, made any note of the report in the Brandeis Police dispatch log, which they were required to do by law. Nor did they take any action until an hour later. The lawsuit calls Carter’s actions “in direct contravention of proper training, if she had received it, and common sense,” further adding that had Carter responded to the call, “she literally would have heard Eli’s cries for help.”
At 10:16 a.m., more than an hour later, the lawsuit holds that Carter drove a police car down “the rear library service road,” which “failed to even pass the location that the Professor described.” In fact, during the call with the professor, he had specifically told Carter that the person he observed was not on that road. What’s more, the report alleges that Carter “never got out of or even stopped her car, instead merely driving down the road and then driving away.” The lawsuit contends that “if Officer Carter had gotten out of her car and walked to the area that the Professor had described to her in detail, she would have seen Eli laying on the ground, precisely where the Professor had reported seeing Eli and where Eli’s body would later be found. At that time, Eli was alive and would have lived had Officer Carter responded appropriately to the Professor’s report.” This drive, too, was not entered into the log by either of the two officers.
Around two hours later, Espada answered a call from Stuart’s mother, who had grown concerned about her child’s mental health and wanted to report them missing. Espada, who the lawsuit claims “sound[ed] bored and bothered to be receiving the phone call,” allegedly treated the matter as routine, failing to link the missing student report with the prior report of the person lying on the ground, which, as the lawsuit alleges, he was fully aware of. Instead, Espada simply called the Department of Community Living to check Stuart’s card swipe history, which only showed them entering their dorm on the previous night. On the recorded call, Espada was heard stating “Yea, I think the mother, she is kinda used to dealing with this,” a repsonse which the lawsuit calls “callous.” Espada allegedly took no further steps to investigate Stuart’s disappearance.
At 1:40 p.m., Brandeis Police began searching for Stuart based on their cell phone data. A police dog and a search helicopter were called in from Massachusetts State Police, according to the Brandeis Police dispatch log included with the lawsuit. At 8:00 p.m., Stuart was discovered “precisely where the Professor had reported seeing a human being lying on the ground at 9:08 that morning.” Stuart was transported to Newton-Wellsley Hospital, where they were pronounced dead at 10:13 p.m.
The lawsuit states that “Brandeis and its employees left Eli to die an agonizing death for nearly 12 hours after the report by the professor.”
The lawsuit further goes into the findings of Brandeis Police’s own internal investigation of the events. According to that investigation, which is included in the lawsuit’s public filing, on the following day, Dec. 6, an email was sent out to the Brandeis community announcing the tragic news of Stuart’s death. Alledgedly, it was only after seeing that email that Officers Carter and Espada made any connection between Stuart’s death and the call from the Professor they had received. At that point, Stuart called Dana Kelley, a Lieutenant Detective with the Brandeis Police, explained the situation and asked “whether she was in trouble.” Kelley told her to wait until he got to work.
Allegedly, after arriving at the office, Kelley was “shocked” by what he heard on the Professor’s recorded call. Carter then allegedly entered Kelley’s office “anxious and unannounced,” and told Kelley that “she felt awful that the body had been discovered” and that “she knew she fucked up.” Carter also said that “‘she’d just driven down the road behind the library and looked at the wood line from her moving cruiser and didn’t see anyone in the woods,’” which the lawsuit takes as an admission that Carter had never left her car. According to the internal inverstigation, Kelley suggested that Carter contact her union representative.
Carter later gave a voluntary statement, in which the lawsuit alleges that “she vastly minimized the Professor’s report to her and augmented her ‘investigation’ into his report.” For instance, Carter wrote that she had a clear view of the pond, even though the lawsuit claims “she could not have, as the area is wooded,” and Carter also wrote that she had “looked down the pathway,” even though the lawsuit claims that “the portion where Eli lay would not have been visible from the road”. Following this, Kelley met with Chief of Public Saftey Matthew Rushton and showed him the recording. In the internal investigation report, Kelley stated that both him and Rushton were shocked, and that “we could not believe that Officer Carter had handled this call for help in such a callous and unprofessional manner.” Officer Carter would later be placed on administrative leave.
That same day, Eli’s mother and aunt flew into Boston and met with Detective Kelley, who, according to the lawsuit, “chose to conceal the circumstances surrounding Eli’s death.” Kelley allegedly did not mention the professor’s phone call, or Carter and Espada’s reponses to the professor’s call, to the family. The lawsuit claims that it took a month for the family to come to know the true circumstances of Stuart’s death from the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, and it took “many months after that” for the family to learn that Detective Kelley had known of Carter and Espada’s responses when they had met.
In the meantime, Kelley began an internal investigation. The professor who had made the call was interviewed, and was invited to trace his steps on that day, which allowed Kelley to determine that his description of Stuart’s location was accurate. Espada was also interviewed. When asked about why he didn’t note the professor’s call in the log, Espada simply answered, “I just didn’t do it.” He also claimed that the professor “should have been more involved” in helping Stuart. However, according to interview logs included with the lawsuit, the professor had earlier told Kelley that he “did not feel safe approaching the individual”, as he had “past experience[s] with [the] unpredictable behavior of individuals in unusual places.”
The Brandeis Police ultimately determined that there had been “a serious dereliction of duty and a failure to act with the prudence that a reasonable person would exercise under the same conditions,” including this determiniation in the opening of the Internal Affairs report.
The lawsuit concludes with a list of all the charges that are being filed. Firstly, Brandeis, Officer Carter and Officer Espada are being charged with wrongful death, since they “each owed Eli a duty to exercise reasonable care, which they flagrantly breached” and their “negligence caused the death of Eli.” They are also charged with causing “Concious Pain and Suffering,” since they “caused Eli to endure horrific pain and suffering including hours screaming for help which should have been forthcoming until their death.” In addition, there are four counts of “loss of consortium,” one for each member of Stuart’s family. This is a legal term that, according to the law firm of Altman and Altman, is defined as “available in virtually any scenario where an individual is losing a sense of companionship, support or comfort from the injured party.” In addition, Eli’s parents are suing Lt. Detective Kelley for “Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress,” as Kelley, as alleged above, “concealed the circumstances of Eli’s death.” The final count is “Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress,” filed by all four family members against all of the defendants, as the “defendants took actions that they knew or should have known would cause Eli’s plaintiff survivors emotional distress,” and that “a reasonable person would have suffered emotional distress as a result of defendant’s actions.”
In the MA POST Sustained Allegations and Disciplinary Actions database, Officer Kimberly Carter is currently listed as “Resigned/Retired in Lieu of Discipline.” The database states that “Officer Carter’s failure to act with the prudence expected of a law enforcement officer and her neglect to appropriately investigate or escalate the initial report contributed to this tragic outcome. Her conduct during this incident was unbecoming of an officer and failed to meet the standards of professional responsibility.”
Eli Stuart received a funeral service in their home of Texas on Monday, Dec. 9, 2023. The funeral was livestreamed to the Brandeis community at the Shapiro Campus Center (SCC), and a gathering was held in the SCC afterwards. At the time, former President Ron Liebowitz said in a community-wide email, “I am deeply saddened by Eli’s passing, and have been in touch with their family to let them know that they are in our thoughts, and to offer our continued support … May Eli’s memory be a blessing.”
