A Utah advertising executive filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the hospital that was caring for his wife when she died.
Bill Reagan filed the complaint on Feb. 21 against the University of Utah’s hospitals, clinics, and staff members, according to The Salt Lake City Tribune.
His wife, 81-year-old Julia Reagan, had died on June 12, 2024, just one day after checking into a center in Salt Lake City.
The tragedy began unfolding for the Reagans on June 10, two days before Julia’s death.
The couple had just come home from Minnesota, where Julia visited the Mayo Clinic for her annual checkup.
Upon their return to Salt Lake City, Julia, feeling unwell, took 7.5 mg of hydrocodone, a cough suppressant and pain reliever.
According to the complaint, she became “dehydrated and very drowsy.”
An EMT whom Bill called said Julia was stable and wouldn’t need to go to the emergency room.
The next day, Julia vomited in the morning and the afternoon, and was ambulanced to the University of Utah Hospital.
If you lost a loved one in this manner would you sue the hospital?
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Upon testing, staff discovered a “mild” collapse of Julia’s lungs; they also discovered a “large fluid-filled, distended hiatal hernia and stomach,” according to the complaint.
A danger existed that Julia might choke on her vomit, something the staff was instructed to closely monitor.
A nurse ordered that Julia should be positioned upright during meals and 30 minutes after, and that she should otherwise be positioned upright at an angle of 35 to 45 degrees.
Yet according to the complaint, the staff didn’t sufficiently watch Julia.
Early the morning of June 12, she vomited at least once, which caused “catastrophic injury to her lungs and brain, leading to cardiac arrest and death.”
Julia Reagan — the matriarch of a Utah outdoor advertising company who was memorialized on billboards across Salt Lake City last year — is now the subject of a wrongful death lawsuit. https://t.co/Pk7hI4PEnj
— The Salt Lake Tribune (@sltrib) February 25, 2025
“We had four children and were married 58-and-a-half years,” Bill Reagan said about his wife, according to KSTU-TV in Salt Lake City.
Bill is the founder of Reagan Outdoor Advertising, the largest billboard company in Utah.
Since Julia’s death, Bill has cast a tribute to his late wife on more than 60 billboards across the state and country.
“She was my love,” Reagan said with tears. “Our life together was this business. We had six or seven signs when we got married. We have 9,000 now.”
Bill said in late 2024 that he planned to keep some of the billboards up at least a year.
“So often when people die, they very quickly are forgotten. We go through all the ceremonies of the funeral and the wake and everything, but then it all dies down, and I didn’t want to have it be like that with her.”
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