Estate of Mehrer v. Walgreens Specialty Pharmacy, 2023-Ohio-2070
Family Can Pursue Pharmacy for Wrongful Death
The 10th District Court of Appeals reversed the Franklin County Common Pleas decision and entry granting summary judgment to Walgreens and remanded the case back to the trial court. The sole assignment of error was whether the trial court erred in granting the Appellee-Defendants’ summary judgment motion based on a finding of lack of proximate cause when Appellant-Plaintiffs expert affidavit alleged that “if not for the initial significant exposure [to opioids], the decedent would have had the potential to live up to his Division I scholarship potential, rather than drop out of school, and proceed to a heroin use disorder.”
In October 2009, Steven A. Mehrer was a senior football player at Dublin Jerome High School. He injured his shoulder in a football game and underwent a rotator cuff repair. Following the surgery, Walgreens dispensed 210 tablets of hydrocodone and 50 tablets of oxycodone over a period of 54 days. According to his parents, Steven became addicted to opioids and entered drug rehab five times before his death on October 8, 2017, approximately eight years after the initial exposure to opioids. Plaintiffs alleged that Walgreens owed a duty to dispense medications in good faith and that Defendants breached that duty when it filled prescriptions for a significant amount of opioids on four separate occasions over such a short period.
The trial court concluded that the estate could not demonstrate that Walgreens’ actions were the proximate cause of the death because Plaintiffs’ expert’s findings were speculative. The Court of Appeals reversed finding that Plaintiffs’ expert’s affidavit was enough to create a genuine issue of material fact as to proximate causation.
