Temperatures and courtroom tensions are rising every year in Southern Nevada as hundreds die in the desert heat and some families seek justice in the form of monetary settlements.
According to over a half-dozen lawsuits that the Las Vegas Review-Journal has identified, the extreme heat of the Mojave Desert has killed people in a broken-down tour bus, in the parking lot of a hospital and in homes without adequate air conditioning.
In decades past, their deaths could have been written off as health-related accidents. But an increasing number of lawsuits in Clark County have been accusing businesses and organizations of negligence when someone dies from the extreme heat.
“Ordinary personal injury lawyers who are usually doing car accidents and slip-and-falls in hotels are now finding out that heat is one of the sources of their cases,” said Frank Fritz, a UNLV environmental law professor.
The Review-Journal has identified at least 10 lawsuits in recent years in which attorneys have claimed that businesses or organizations have acted negligently when someone died of extreme heat.
Ordinary personal injury lawyers who are usually doing car accidents and slip-and-falls in hotels are now finding out that heat is one of the sources of their cases.
While these lawsuits are largely left off official databases of climate change litigation, such as the one maintained by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, Fritz said he believes they may qualify.
“Climate change is killing people: burning houses, burning cities,” he said. “People are suing about that.”
Cases shift understanding of legal negligence
In one case, 60-year-old Lisa Borowski was found dead in a group home without functioning air conditioning near downtown Las Vegas. She only had fans to offer relief from the temperatures in the bedroom, which crept past 108 degrees, according to the lawsuit.
Borowski’s skin was 106 degrees when her body was found, and the home had “no obvious licensing displayed,” according to her autopsy report. She died of drug use and heat stress, the report said.
Nevada law requires landlords to maintain existing air conditioning units, but they have several days to show a “good faith” effort to address any problems.
“Given the nature of what that house held itself out to be, I don’t really care if (air conditioning) was required in there or not,” said attorney Daniel Hill, who is representing Borowski’s family in the lawsuit. “I think it’s negligent not to have AC in that kind of residence.”
In 2023, the family of Virginia DeSapio sued her home warranty company after it failed to make timely repairs to her air conditioning. DeSapio, 82, was found dead in her home from environmental heat stress on Aug. 22, 2022 — 11 days after she notified the company that her air conditioning was not working and needed repairs.
The temperature in Las Vegas peaked at 104 degrees the day DeSapio’s body was found, according to the National Weather Service. A friend found her dead in her bedroom with multiple electric fans running, according to a Clark County coroner’s office autopsy report. Death investigators noted that the body of her dog, Jesse, was in the hallway outside the bedroom.
According to the lawsuit, the home warranty company did not repair the air conditioner until two weeks after her death.
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Litigation in the DeSapio case is ongoing, court records show. But a similar lawsuit also filed in 2023 reached a $350,000 settlement, records show.
In that case, the son of an 81-year-old woman sued her apartment complex for failing to fix her broken air conditioning unit.
Carolyn Brown was found dead in her home, at the Playa Vista apartment complex in east Las Vegas, on June 13, 2022.
Brown’s body was found during a welfare check, and her death was caused by environmental heat stress, according to the lawsuit. Other residents in the building lived without air conditioning for about a month after Brown’s death, attorneys alleged in the suit.
One case yields scientific study
Years before those cases, a wrongful death lawsuit that involved extreme heat led to a first-of-its-kind study on the effects of rising temperatures in a hot vehicle on the human body.
As part of the discovery process in the 2008 lawsuit, attorney Eckley Keach worked with researchers to study temperatures inside a car placed in UNLV’s parking lot. The researchers worked to replicate the conditions faced by Gail Neidleman when she died after four hours inside a locked vehicle in August 2007.
Neidleman was a mentally disabled woman who walked away from employees at a group home and became trapped in a parked vehicle in the middle of the afternoon.
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Researchers estimated that temperatures inside the car rose up to 140 degrees and never dropped below 115 degrees over the four hours that Neidleman was stuck inside the vehicle.
The lawsuit ended in a settlement, Keach said. He had set out to prove the defendants wrong after they claimed Neidleman “didn’t really suffer that much.”
“Once we published the journal, this case was settled within a couple of months after that,” Keach said. “What we put together was irrefutable.”
At temperatures that high, the body’s normal methods of regulating heat through sweating start to fail. Heat stroke resulting in brain injury and multiple-organ failure occurs once the body’s internal temperature rises above 106 degrees. Researchers believe Neidleman fell unconscious about 2½ hours after getting into the vehicle.
The study revealed that even a relatively mild summer day can turn deadly — the ambient air temperature the day Neidleman died was between 89 and 93 degrees. And maximum temperatures in August substantially increased in the proceeding decades. In 2024, the hottest Las Vegas summer on record, temperatures peaked at 114 in August, according to the National Weather Service.
Assessing liability could change with precedent
Fritz said he expects to see more heat-related lawsuits as summers get hotter.
Scientists at Climate Central, a nonpartisan group of scientists, consider Las Vegas to be the second-fastest-warming city in the nation, with a 6-degree increase of annual average temperatures since 1970. It’s second only to Reno, where temperatures have risen 7.9 degrees in that period.
“Things are changing because our climate’s changing,” Fritz said. “So the standard, the duty of care in a negligence case, is changing because the environment’s changing.”
Fritz said that when there’s a more direct cause for a death — such as a landlord failing to fix an air conditioner — it’s easier to prove a case’s claims. The Review-Journal reviewed multiple heat-related lawsuits in Southern Nevada focused on those accused of being directly negligent in a case.
But one case out of Washington state is taking the concept of negligence to a new level in heat-related deaths, and is directly going after big oil companies, including ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell and Conoco.
In a lawsuit filed last year, Misti Leon alleged that greenhouse gas emissions and associated global warming from oil companies contributed to the death of her mother, who died during the Pacific Northwest’s worst heat wave on record in 2021. Scientists determined that the heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.
“When a tragedy like Julie’s death results from the prolific use of fossil fuels, it is easy to dismiss the misfortune as an accident rather than a foreseeable consequence of Defendants’ deception,” Leon’s lawyers wrote. “Through affirmative misrepresentations and omissions, Defendants have made trillions of dollars and escaped accountability for their actions.”
A judge denied a motion to dismiss Leon’s lawsuit in July.
According to Fritz, lawyers in Southern Nevada and across the country may more thoughtfully consider holding polluters accountable for wrongful death should this case proceed.
He likens it to lawsuits against the tobacco industry, where many have prevailed in proving that companies were legally responsible for cancer or deaths of those who used their products.
“Leon is the precedent,” Fritz said. “It’s the first case I know of where a judge has said this is a real legal claim, and other lawyers are going to take notice of that.”
How plaintiffs build a case
Lawsuits can take years, and they involve a fair amount of energy, emotion and time from those who bring them forward.
The circumstances for heat-related wrongful death lawsuits have run the gamut as to who may have been negligent.
Jamie Miller, a lawyer at Christian Morris Trial Attorneys in Henderson, said the majority of her wrongful death cases have taken about five years to reach the trial phase. Miller’s firm is representing the DeSapio family over Virginia DeSapio’s heat-related death.
Miller said the DeSapio case is far from the first time a potential client has reached out about a dispute over air conditioning. However, every case is context-specific, she said.
“You can’t sue the heat,” Miller said. “So, in this case, there has to be some sort of reason why there’s a delay in getting the air conditioning repaired.”
Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240. Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com.
