Iowa Judicial Branch Building
DES MOINES, Iowa - Families of missing persons bringing a wrongful death lawsuit in Iowa have two years from a court’s declaration of presumed death, as opposed to the date the person went missing, to file their claim.
That’s the ruling from the Iowa Supreme Court last Friday in a lawsuit brought by the family of Cynthia Miles against her mental health care providers and facility operator after she ran away from a psychiatric treatment facility and was never seen again.
Miles suffered from acute psychosis and severe depression resulting in auditory hallucinations and suicidal ideation when she was admitted to the Nebraska Medical Center after attempting suicide in the summer of 2021.
On two separate occasions, and after being transferred to different treatment facilities, Miles tried to run away but eventually was found and returned to her treatment clinics.
But her third escape, in November of that year, proved fateful.
After allegedly reporting more suicidal thoughts, and despite her two prior escape attempts, Miles was hospitalized and admitted to an unlocked facility run by Harbor Point Crisis Stabilization Residential Services, according to the court.
Within two weeks at Harbor Point, Miles ran away and was never found. Miles escaped into the night with only a light jacket and windbreaker amid temperatures ranging between a wintery 28 and 36 degrees. No one reported her missing for four days.
The following June, Miles’ family petitioned the Pottawattamie County district court for a certificate of presumed death, which it issued on Aug. 29 after a jury trial.
Over a year later, on Nov. 9, 2023, the estate’s administrator, Kindle Schneider, filed a lawsuit against Miles’ mental health providers and the operator of Harbor Point claiming their negligence led to Miles’ death.
Schneider’s first complaint was voluntarily dismissed, however, after the defendants argued that the required certificate of merit affidavit was legally deficient.
She refiled the claim on Aug. 28, 2024, just one day shy of the two-year anniversary of the district court’s declaration of Miles’s death, though well more than two years after Miles went missing in November 2021.
The defendants again moved for summary judgment, this time arguing that Schneider’s claims were time barred because the two-year statute of limitations had run on Nov. 11, 2023 – two years after Miles escaped from the Harbor Point facility – or, at the latest, on June 8, 2024 – two years after Miles’ family filed its petition to have her declared dead.
The district court denied the defendants’ motion, and the Iowa Supreme Court took up the defendants’ interlocutory appeal.
In most cases involving an injury or death, the statute of limitations begins to run when the plaintiff knew or should have known about the cause of harm.
Miles’ case raised an interesting twist of when to start the limitations period when there’s no definite date of injury or death.
The defendants argued that the triggering event is the date Schneider was on notice of a claim – in other words, the date Miles went missing. At a minimum, they asserted, the limitations period started when the family petitioned the court for a declaration of death in June 2024.
This fits within the usual approach for determining limitations periods, defendants argued, and turned on Iowa precedent holding that wrongful death suits are derivative of the injuries that caused them. “[T]he death of the injured party increases the damages the estate can recover, but it does not give rise to a new cause of action,” the court has held in other wrongful death cases.
But “[t]his is not a case where death enhances the damages from a personal injury; it is a case where death is the injury,” Justice Thomas Waterman wrote for a unanimous Court.
“Miles did not suffer compensable injuries on the date of her disappearance,” the court found, “and, because she was never found, the date on which she suffered a compensable injury (if any) remains unknown.”
“The analysis quickly devolves into a Sorites puzzle,” the court continued. “The puzzle is solved, though, if we hold that—in cases where there is no discrete physical injury and it is unknown whether the person who disappeared is alive or dead— the limitations hourglass does not turn until the judicial determination of death.”
This reasoning solved the conundrum faced by Schneider – despite Miles’ disappearance for over half a year, Schneider had no way to know whether an actionable injury had happened on Nov. 11, 2021, the date Miles ran away, or at any point thereafter.
The certainty that would support a wrongful death action was provided only after the district court issued its certificate of presumed death on Aug. 29, 2022.
“The legal presumption that Miles was alive did not end until the district court action determined that she had died,” the court ruled. It was not until that point that Schneider could bring the estate’s wrongful death action and at that point that the statute of limitations began to run.
That meant Schneider had until Aug. 29, 2024, to bring the estate’s claim – one day after the complaint was refiled.
The court was not persuaded by concerns that its ruling would allow plaintiffs to end-run the statute of limitations in missing persons cases by waiting to seek a declaration of death, noting that the state’s six-year statute of repose – after which any claims would expire even if the plaintiff were unaware of the cause of action – would bookend defendants’ potential liability.
“First, this case is unique,” the court stated. “In almost all other cases, the date on which the plaintiff knew or should have known of the compensable injury will be obvious… Second, the repose provision in [the] Iowa Code… ensures that a wrongful-death action against healthcare providers will be time-barred six years from the date of the alleged negligence.”
The case was sent back to the district court for further proceedings.
