Question: Does the doctrine of fraudulent concealment toll the 2 year deadline for filing claims contained within Indiana’s Wrongful Death Act?
Answer: Yes it can.
In November 2006, a woman was a resident at the Good Samaritan Nursing Home in Evansville. On November 17, 2006, an employee told the woman’s daughter that she had fallen and was being taken to the hospital because she had started vomiting a few hours after the fall. Because the woman suffered from “mini-strokes” which had caused her to fall in the past, her family believed Good Samaritan’s story. On November 26, 2006, the woman died from a head injury purportedly caused by the fall. On November 24, 2009, nearly 3 years after her death, a former employee told the woman’s daughter that the head injury had not been caused by a simple fall, but was due to the woman being attacked and pushed to the floor by another resident of the nursing home, and the head injury that resulted in her death was caused during this attack. On December 22, 2010, an estate was opened for the sole purpose of pursuing a wrongful death claim. On October 27, 2011, the Plaintiffs filed their complaint, alleging that the woman’s death had been proximately caused by the negligence of Good Samaritan and that Good Samaritan had fraudulently concealed the true cause of Hargis’s death.
Indiana first enacted a wrongful death statute in 1852. Like other wrongful death acts across the country, this statute was enacted to solve what was perceived to be a gross inequity in the common law—that because there was no common law action that allowed a person’s family members to recover when another’s wrongful act or omission killed their loved one and the person’s own claim died with him, it was often cheaper for a defendant to kill his victim than to maim him.
We agree with the Plaintiffs that to deny a decedent’s personal representatives the ability to file a wrongful death action when such cause of action has been fraudulently concealed by a defendant beyond the WDA’s two-year limitations period would allow the defendant to take egregious advantage of his or her own malfeasance. The United States Supreme Court has stated: [W]e need look no further than the maxim that no man may take advantage of his own wrong. Deeply rooted in our jurisprudence this principle has been applied in many diverse classes of cases by both law and equity courts and has frequently been employed to bar inequitable reliance on statutes of limitations.
In the State of Indiana, the Fraudulent Concealment Statute provides: If a person liable to an action conceals the fact from the knowledge of the person entitled to bring the action, the action may be brought at any time within the period of limitation after the discovery of the cause of action. I.C. § 34–11–5–1. Accordingly, we conclude that where one fraudulently conceals the existence of a wrongful death action beyond the WDA’s 2-year limitations period, the decedent’s personal representative shall be entitled to commence the action within the lesser of two years from the date of the discovery of the cause of action or two years from the discovery of facts that, in the exercise of reasonable diligence, should lead to the discovery of the wrongful act or omission that resulted in the decedent’s death.
Alldredge v. Good Samaritan Home, Inc. — N.E.2d —-, 2013 WL 372651 Ind.App.,2013.