A Second $5.5 Million Verdict Against Townhouse Center in Uniondale: What Families of Nursing Home Residents Should Know

On September 18, 2026, after a two-week trial in State Supreme Court in Nassau County, a jury awarded $5.5 million to the family of Lucy Riker, a 91-year-old woman from Franklin Square who died in hospice weeks after being admitted to Townhouse Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Uniondale. The reporting on the verdict comes from Newsday, whose account of the trial and the award is the basis for the facts described here.

According to Newsday, the award broke down into $2 million for violations of Riker's rights as a nursing home resident, $2 million on a negligence claim for her pain and suffering, and $1.5 million in punitive damages. Riker's two daughters had filed the wrongful death and negligence suit in 2024. The daughters visited their mother daily while she was at the facility and testified at the trial.

The lawyer who tried the case, John Dalli, told Newsday that his team proved Townhouse violated multiple sections of the public health law in its care of Lucy Riker, violating her rights as a resident, causing her serious injury, and causing her death, and that it was also negligent in a way that caused preventable pain and suffering. Dalli said the verdict was the second $5.5 million award against Townhouse this year and, according to him, the highest ever against a Nassau County nursing home.

Riker was a retired medical assistant who had been living in Franklin Square with her husband of 76 years and a daughter. According to the account her lawyer gave Newsday, she suffered a fall in 2022 and sustained a back fracture, and she had no other serious underlying health problems. After the fall she was required to wear a back brace when standing and moving around. The brace caused a bedsore that became infected, which led to a short hospitalization.

When she was discharged from the hospital in mid-December, Riker was sent to Townhouse for what was expected to be short-term rehabilitation before returning home. Her daughters gave the facility specific instructions: because she was still wearing the back brace, she should not be left to use a diaper or bedpan, and she needed two aides to help her to the toilet. Her lawyer told Newsday those directions were ignored by the understaffed facility.

The daughters testified about what they saw on their daily visits. In their lawyer's words to Newsday, they described call bells that were never answered, having to toilet their mother themselves because there were too few aides to help, arriving in the morning to find her in a urine-soaked and soiled brief, and finding her crying and in pain because her medication was not given properly or on time. He said their complaints were met with disdain and that management told them not to worry and that things would get better.

Instead, the situation got worse. On January 3, 2023, at 4:40 in the morning, Riker was found on the floor of her room near the bathroom. She told her daughters she had been ringing her call bell to use the bathroom and, when no one came, tried to make it on her own. She fell backward, hit her head, and fractured her hip. She had emergency surgery at NYU Langone Hospital in Mineola, and her lawyer said the injury caused her to develop postsurgical delirium and encephalopathy. She died in hospice not long after.

Townhouse denied responsibility. In court papers, its attorneys argued that Riker's injuries were not the facility's fault and were caused by her own "culpable conduct and want of care." That is a common defense in fall cases, and it is the facility's right to raise it. The jury heard that argument and rejected it, but it belongs in any fair account of the case.

Newsday reported that attorneys for Townhouse did not respond to its request for comment on the verdict. Townhouse is a 280-bed facility, operated by a for-profit company, and Newsday described it as carrying a two-star rating from the state Department of Health. We have not seen a public statement from the facility responding to the September verdict, and if one is issued it deserves the same weight as the claims against it.

It is also worth being precise about what a verdict is and is not. A jury of twelve people, having heard two weeks of sworn testimony and cross-examination, found the facility liable by a preponderance of the evidence. That is a far higher bar than an untested allegation in a complaint. It is not, however, the last word. Facilities routinely file post-trial motions asking a judge to set aside or reduce a verdict, and they can appeal. A punitive-damages award in particular can be challenged. The $5.5 million figure is what the jury returned, not necessarily what will be paid.

The Riker case is not the only recent verdict against this home. Newsday reported that in July 2026 the same attorney secured a separate $5.5 million verdict against Townhouse involving the death of a 71-year-old woman who had gone there for rehabilitation and developed a bedsore near her lower back and spine that ended up killing her. Two multimillion-dollar verdicts against a single facility in a single year is not background noise.

Both cases share a through-line that families should understand, because it is the most common cause of preventable harm in nursing homes: staffing. A bedsore that forms and then goes untreated, a call bell that no one answers, a resident who is left to get to the bathroom alone because there are not enough aides to help her, these are the predictable results of too few hands on a unit. Our article on nursing home abuse and how to recognize neglect walks through the warning signs, and it explains why understaffing turns known risks into injuries.

The staffing problem is worse now than it was a year ago at the national level. Our article on the repeal of the federal nursing home staffing rule explains how a federal minimum-staffing standard that was meant to put a floor under this exact problem was struck down and then blocked from taking effect, which leaves residents relying on state rules and on litigation like these cases to hold facilities accountable. When a home cannot or will not staff safely, a lawsuit is often the only force that changes anything.

The Riker verdict rested in part on a New York law written specifically for nursing home residents. Under Public Health Law Section 2801-d, a residential health care facility that deprives a resident of a right or benefit guaranteed by statute, regulation, or contract can be held liable to that resident for the resulting injuries. This is the "violations of rights" claim that the jury valued at $2 million in Riker's case, and it runs alongside an ordinary negligence claim rather than replacing it.

The statute has features that matter to families. Where a facility's deprivation of a right is found to have been willful or in reckless disregard of the resident's rights, the law allows punitive damages, which is the basis on which the jury could add the $1.5 million punitive award here. A court may also award attorney's fees to a resident who wins. And any clause in an admission agreement that tried to make a resident give up the right to sue, or the right to a jury trial, is void under the statute and cannot be enforced.

Federal rules apply on top of the state law. Facilities that take Medicare or Medicaid must provide each resident the care needed to maintain their highest practicable well-being and must follow an individualized care plan, under 42 C.F.R. Part 483. An instruction that a resident needs two aides to be toileted safely, if it is part of the care plan, is exactly the kind of requirement those rules exist to enforce. We covered this same statute and these same federal rules in our article on The Grand at Mohawk Valley choking death case, another New York facility where the question was whether staff delivered the supervision a resident's condition required.

Nursing home cases are usually built on the gap between what a facility documented and what actually happened. The care plan should state what help a resident needs, including how many aides are required for a task like toileting. The staffing and assignment records show who was actually on the unit. The nursing notes, the call-bell logs, and the medication administration record show whether care was delivered on time. When the chart describes care that the staffing records show could not have been provided, that gap is the case.

The electronic record often settles these disputes. Our article on EMR audit trails explains how the metadata behind a chart can reveal when an entry was really made, changed, or backfilled, which matters when a written care plan describes attention a resident never received. In a fall case like Riker's, the call-bell timestamps and the incident report set against the time she was found on the floor are what turn a tragedy into a provable claim.

If your family member is or was at Townhouse, or at any nursing home where you are worried about care, act to preserve the record. Federal law gives residents and their representatives the right to inspect and copy the complete medical record, so request it in writing: the admitting orders, the care plan and any updates, the Minimum Data Set assessments, nursing notes, the medication administration record, and any fall, wound, or incident reports. Save your own materials too, including visit dates, the names of staff you spoke with, photographs of any bedsore or injury, and any messages with the facility. You can also pull the home's public inspection history from the federal Care Compare system and from independent databases like ProPublica's Nursing Home Inspect, which publish deficiencies, staffing data, and penalties for every certified facility.

New York's filing deadlines are strict, and for a family that has lost a loved one the shortest one usually controls. A wrongful death claim in New York generally must be brought within two years of the date of death. A claim for the resident's own injuries and pain runs on a different schedule, generally three years for ordinary negligence and a statutory claim under Section 2801-d, and roughly two and one-half years for medical malpractice. Because the right deadline depends on how the claim is framed, and because specific facts can shorten it, the only safe move is to have a lawyer confirm your window rather than guess.

Waiting is the expensive mistake. A missed deadline ends a valid claim before anyone gets to argue whether it had merit, no matter how strong the underlying facts are. The Riker family filed in 2024 for care that happened at the end of 2022 and start of 2023, which shows how quickly the window can close on events that feel recent. If you think something went wrong, the time to ask is now, while the answer can still help.

Evidence has a shelf life too. Staffing schedules, call-bell data, internal messages, and video are easiest to preserve when a lawyer sends a preservation letter early, before a facility's ordinary retention cycle erases them. Our article on the statute of limitations for medical malpractice explains how these clocks work and why the safe assumption is that your window is shorter than you think.

The two verdicts against Townhouse belong to the two families who brought them. They do not decide anyone else's case, and a verdict against a facility does not mean every resident there was harmed or that every claim will succeed. What the verdicts do show is that a jury, twice this year, looked at how this facility staffed and cared for residents and found it wanting. If you have watched care fall short for a loved one at Townhouse, or you lost someone there, that history is a reason to have the records reviewed, not a substitute for it.

National Malpractice Lawyers handles nursing home abuse, neglect, and wrongful death cases, and we work with families across the country. A free, confidential review can tell you whether the records and the timeline support a claim, and there is no obligation. Our article on choosing a medical malpractice attorney explains what to look for so you can make that decision with clear eyes. If something felt wrong about the care your family member received, ask now, while the deadline still leaves you a choice.