Content Warning: This article contains mentions of suicide and death.

On Dec. 5, 2023, members of the Brandeis community received an email from Andrea Dine, vice president of Student Affairs, at 11:49 p.m. with the subject line “Sad News.” This email announced the death of Brandeis student Eli Stuart, stating, “This is devastating news for all of us, and I know I speak for our entire community when I say that we share our condolences with Eli’s family and close friends.” Stuart used they/them pronouns, and The Justice will respect these pronouns moving forward.

In the following weeks, the University administration suggested that students access resources such as the Brandeis Counseling Center, Brandeis Hillel and the Trevor Project hotline. At the request of Stuart’s family, memorial services were live-streamed from their synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel of Austin, Texas. The livestream took place in the Shapiro Campus Center, with a gathering and support for students to follow. 

On Oct. 31, 2024, a wrongful death lawsuit was filed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The plaintiffs in this case are Eli’s parents — Alice Stuart and Jason Foley — “individually and together as the Administrators of the Estate of Eli T. Stuart and together as next friends for” Gareth Stuart-Foley. Also Alice Stuart as next friend for Victoria Clark. The defendants are Brandeis University, former Officer Kimberly Carter, Lieutenant Detective Dana Kelley and Officer Thomas Espada.

The lawsuit details the events taking place from the evening of Dec. 4 to the night of Dec. 5. According to the lawsuit, that evening and the next morning, Stuart was actively suicidal. Early in the morning of Dec. 5, they took pills and lay “down near a campus building and path where they were visible to bypassers.” At this time Stuart began recording on their phone. A professor who was exiting a nearby campus building caught a glimpse of a person lying in the woods and called the Brandeis Police Department at approximately 9:08 a.m. to alert them of the situation. 

Brandeis Police Officer Kimberly Carter answered the phone, responding that “the person [the professor] was observing was likely a homeless person.” The lawsuit states “as though the life of a homeless person somehow did not matter” when referring to this response. Carter was not supposed to be answering the phone in the security office, as she was not trained to do so, but was covering for Brandeis Police Officer Thomas Espada, who had stepped away from the phone to help move a desk in another room. According to the suit, “in direct contravention of proper training, if she had received proper training, Carter did not react quickly or in a timely or effective manner in response to the report she had received from the professor. She delayed responding at all.” An hour after the call had been received, Carter got into her patrol car and drove around the University campus, but “she failed to go to the location where the professor told her he had seen Eli, failed to stop her car, failed to get out of her car, and failed even to look for the person lying on the ground,” court documents say. According to the suit, “At that time, Eli was still alive and would have lived had Officer Carter responded appropriately to the Professor's report.” In addition to failing to promptly respond to the call, Carter did not enter the call into the platform utilized by the department in order to allow all reports to be available to all officers when needed.

At 11:59 a.m. on Dec. 5, Alice Stuart called the Brandeis Police Department to report a missing and possibly suicidal child and talked with Espada. She expressed concern due to Stuart’s previous suicide attempts, one resulting in a stay at an intensive care unit and a string of “messages that were very sweet but potentially concerning” that she had received early that morning. Stuart had also turned off their location tracker. The lawsuit cites Espada’s response as “sounding bored and bothered to be receiving the phone call.” According to the lawsuit, Espada did not connect this call to the professor’s report which was never entered into the system, and when Carter was told about the second call, she also failed to link the two. The suit said that Espada responded in a routine manner, calling the Department of Community Living to pull Stuart’s swipe card history, showing that they entered their dorm at 12:15 a.m. This information was labeled as unhelpful, and according to the lawsuit, “based on the police reports, it does not appear that Officer Espada took any further steps to investigate Eli's disappearance.”

Meanwhile, Stuart’s phone continued recording for almost 12 hours, stopping at 4:53 p.m. on Dec. 5. This recording suggests that they changed their mind regarding the suicide, calling out into the woods for help and for Brandeis Emergency Medical Corps many times. 

At approximately 1:40 p.m., the Brandeis Police Department began utilizing phone tracking to attempt to locate Stuart. According to the suit, “at 4:53 pm, Brandeis Police located EIi’s bag and slippers in the vicinity of where the Professor had reported seeing someone lying on the ground.” Following this discovery, “At 5:00 pm, Brandeis Police called the Waltham Police requesting K-9 assistance, who then reached out to the Massachusetts State Police. The State Police also sent a police helicopter to assist in the search.” 

The search lasted for three hours, with a state trooper finding Stuart at 8:00 p.m., in the exact same place where the professor reported seeing a body at 9:08 a.m. on Dec. 5. Medical professionals arrived at the scene at 8:26 p.m. and immediately initiated life-saving measures, transporting Stuart to Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Once there, emergency room staff continued working to save Stuart's life until the official time of death at 10:13 p.m. According to the lawsuit, “following autopsy, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined that Eli had died as a result of drowning and acute intoxication due to the combined effects of various medications.”

According to the lawsuit, Espada ultimately made the connection between the calls after viewing the email from Dine, and informed Carter on Dec. 6. Immediately after finding out, Carter called Lieutenant Detective Dana Kelley at 5:42 a.m. to ask if she was in trouble. He was confused, and she clarified that she had “taken a call from a guy that shared the location of a person on the ground in the woods.” Their conversation concluded, and Kelley proceeded to listen to the recording of the call upon his arrival at work at 7:30 a.m. 

Carter then arrived at Kelley’s office, “anxious and unannounced.” She expressed feeling “awful” and told him that she “knew she fucked up.” Following this conversation, Carter composed a voluntary statement, which the lawsuit points out has some errors, such as impossible sight lines. At 8:02 a.m., Kelley texted Chief of Police Matthew Rushton and asked to speak on the phone. He played the recording and stated in the Internal Affairs Investigation Report that they were both shocked. According to the suit, “Officer Carter was placed on administrative leave several hours later.” 

Kelley met with Alice Stuart and her sister that morning and concealed all potential involvement that the department had in the death of their family member. He did not mention the investigation that was ongoing at that point, nor the call from the professor. Stuart’s family did not learn of any information regarding the failures of the officers until a month later through the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office. The suit states, “It took many months after that to learn that Lt. Det. Kelley had already known of the botched reaction to the Professor's report and had already started an internal investigation into Officer Carter's and Officer Espada’s actions when he met with Alice at Brandeis the morning after EIi’s death.” 

While the investigation was taking place, Espada was interviewed by Kelley. When asked about what he thought would happen to Carter, he responded by “[pointing] the finger at the Professor — the very person that called the Brandeis Police seeking help for the person lying on the ground — and stated that the Professor ‘should have been more involved.’” Interview witness Dispatcher Lima agreed, telling Kelley “that you can’t leave somebody injured if you have reason to believe someone is hurt.” In an interview with the professor, they stated that they did not feel comfortable approaching the person on the ground, hence the decision to call the police department.

The conclusion of the investigation was that the Brandeis Police Department determined that there had been “a serious dereliction of duty and a failure to act with the prudence that a reasonable person would exercise under the same conditions.” The lawsuit states “Officer Carter's and Officer Espada’s failure to take the seconds necessary to create a log entry tragically and significantly delayed the time it took to find Eli and to begin providing life saving measures but for which Eli would have been saved.”

Ultimately, the lawsuit has charges of wrongful death, conscious pain and suffering to pursuant, loss of consortium, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress. 

In an email correspondence with The Justice on Nov. 4, Maria Davis, a lawyer from Todd & Weld working on the case stated, “As alleged in the Complaint, Eli died alone and in agony because Brandeis University and its Police Officers failed to act despite have been told exactly where Eli was suffering on the Brandeis campus. As the lawsuit alleges, if the defendants had timely responded to the reports of a person on the ground near a walking path on campus, Eli would still be with their family. The plaintiffs are seeking in their lawsuit to hold all those who they allege are responsible for Eli's death accountable.”

Stuart was a beloved member of the Brandeis community, having enrolled as a midyear student in the spring of 2023. Despite a history of struggles with mental health challenges, Stuart’s family felt comfortable with them moving across the country for college, “Thinking Eli would be safe at Brandeis, which touts itself not only as a bastion of education but also as an institution whose ‘mission is to ensure that the Brandeis campus is safe and enjoyable for all who choose to live, study and work here,’” according to the lawsuit.

Stuart spoke out and advocated for the rights of many, forming a nonprofit disability education group called Actively Tired. According to the suit, “Eli was also actively involved in advocating for equal rights and battling against discrimination. Eli was passionate about issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community,” and this advocacy extended beyond just Brandeis, as “Eli spoke at the Texas State Capitol, voicing their opposition to the Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council's rule change that allowed social workers to turn down clients on the basis of their disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity” in 2020, ultimately leading the council to restore protections. 

In a statement to The Justice on Nov. 3, fellow Brandeis student and activist from Texas, Cameron Samuels ’26, shared, “My short-lived conversations with Eli made me feel less alone. I greatly admired Eli as an advocate who led with compassion and meaningfully shaped the world with the power of their voice. As LGBTQ+ and disabled Texans at Brandeis, we shared similar lived experiences and visions for the world. Our shared values, grounded in trust and community, were undermined by failed mental health wellness and emergency care. Eli wanted to live, and now that responsibility is upon us. We can all do better in our lives to embody Eli’s legacy. We may start with expressing kindness to one another in our words, actions, and pursuit of justice as Eli did with all of us."

The phone number for the national suicide hotline is (800)-273-8255. This hotline is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

— The Justice Managing Editor Eliza Bier ’26 contributed to the reporting of this article.