Pa. Supreme Court refuses to void lawsuit against UPMC over patient’s murder of neighbor

Terrance Andrews, a drug-addicted psychiatric patient, repeatedly told his caregivers at UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside that he was going to kill one of his neighbors.

Then, he did it. In May 2008 he slashed 18-year-old Lisa Maas, a Pennsylvania Culinary Institute student, to death with a pair of scissors.

Maas’ mother Laura sued UPMC, claiming it had a legal duty to warn her daughter and the other neighbors at the Oakland apartment complex of the danger posed by Andrews.

A divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed with her this week, refusing a plea by UPMC to dismiss her suit. That ruling backs a decision a state Superior Court panel issued two years ago, and it edges the case closer to a trial.

In the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, Justice Kevin M. Dougherty rejected UPMC’s argument that Andrews’ threats weren’t specific enough to trigger its legal duty to alert “readily identifiable” potential victims.

Andrews repeatedly told his caregivers that he would kill his neighbors, so UPMC officials knew those who were in danger lived near him in Hampshire Hall, Dougherty found. Plus, the justice noted, Andrews specifically threatened his next-door neighbor and a neighbor who had knocked on his door in the middle of the night.

“It cannot reasonably be said that when Andrews threatened to kill a ‘neighbor,’ he was uttering an ambiguous threat against an ‘amorphous group’ of the public at large,” Dougherty wrote.

He cited the Code of Ethics of Pennsylvania’s State Board of Psychology, which states psychologists should take “reasonable measures to prevent harm when a client has expressed a serious threat or intent to kill or seriously injure an identified or readily identifiable person or group of people.”

Given the specifics of Andrews’ threats, UPMC officials should have realized Lisa Maas was a “readily identifiable” potential victim of his murderous intentions, Dougherty found.

Justice Max Baer filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice Thomas G. Saylor.

Baer argued that Andrews’ threats weren’t specific enough to trigger UPMC’s duty to warn. “One’s ‘neighbor’ in an urban setting … is not readily identifiable, as it may encompass tenants on either side of one’s apartment; tenants residing on the same floor; those living on other floors in the same building; residents inhabiting apartments in a building adjacent to the patient’s residence; and those living on the same block or within the same community, and so on, without a discernible limited criteria,” he wrote.

“To impose a legal obligation on mental health professionals to warn a large, amorphous group of potential targets is unworkable, as mental health professionals will be unable to ascertain who is entitled to a warning,” Baer insisted.

Andrews, now 50, was convicted of first-degree murder by an Allegheny County jury in 2011. He is serving a life prison term with no possibility of parole.