Background: Waterbury Hospital in Waterbury, Connecticut (Google Maps). Inset: Dale Martin (Lindsay Martin).
A 21-year-old woman who entered a Connecticut hospital with a broken ankle was given so much pain medication that she suffocated and died, according to a lawsuit.
If Dale Martin had not gone to Waterbury Hospital, “she would be alive today,” the complaint states. “Dale’s healthcare providers at Waterbury Hospital should have kept her safe. Instead, they caused her death.”
Love true crime? Sign up for our newsletter, The Law&Crime Docket, to get the latest real-life crime stories delivered right to your inbox.
On the morning of April 9, 2025, Martin was working on a New England farm. She had come to the Constitution State on a gap year from college, her family said.
While on the farm, Martin tripped and broke her ankle, and she was brought to Waterbury Hospital in Waterbury, Connecticut, located in the west-central part of the state. Staff diagnosed her with a complex fracture and determined that she would have surgery the next morning.
She was “persistently crying in pain,” stated that her pain was a 10 out of 10 and that morphine she was given “worked for maybe 5 minutes,” court documents attached to the complaint add. Still, Martin “was fine,” giving her family “a big smile” via FaceTime, the complaint says.
As the night rolled on, hospital workers gave Martin opioid pain medications, including through an IV, according to the lawsuit. It adds, however, that the “medical providers administered such high doses of medication that Dale’s body’s impulse to breathe was impeded. She lay in her hospital bed, her lungs slowing and the oxygen flow to her body decreasing.”
Martin was suffocating while sedated, her family claims. Because no one checked on her, according to the lawsuit, “Dale could not even call for help as she suffocated.”
The following morning, a nurse checked on the patient, but it was “far too late.” The complaint says Martin was “unresponsive” as she had stopped breathing and her heart had stopped.
“Hospital personnel were able to resuscitate Dale, but her brain injury was too severe for her to have any chance of recovery,” the lawsuit goes on. Four days after Martin was admitted to the hospital, she was declared brain-dead.
She had reportedly suffered an anoxic encephalopathy, which happens “when the brain goes without oxygen, even for a short time.”
Martin’s father filed the lawsuit, which names Waterbury Hospital and one of its doctors among the defendants. As the father tells it, they failed his daughter because of improper supervision of staff, inadequate staffing and failure to check how the medication affected their patient, among other things.
The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of damages.
According to CT Insider, Prospect Medical Holdings owned the hospital at the time of Martin’s death, but UConn Health bought the hospital from the bankrupt company in a taxpayer-funded $13 million deal that went through in March 2026.
“The quality, safety, and wellbeing of our patients is our top priority,” UConn Health told the outlet, pointing additional questions about the lawsuit to Prospect Medical Holdings, which reportedly did not respond to CT Insider’s request for comment.
The post 21-year-old woman who went to hospital for broken ankle died after staff gave her so much opioid medication she suffocated: Lawsuit first appeared on Law & Crime.
