Arizona Family Seeks Justice After Son’s Death Following Hospital Discharge

An Arizona family is pushing for accountability after their 27-year-old son was improperly released from a hospital, resulting in his death just a few hours later. According to a wrongful death lawsuit, Kaelen Lachka was left abandoned on a sidewalk during a sweltering summer day.

His parents, Seth and Gail Lachka, assert that staff at Abrazo Health Arrowhead placed their son in an Uber and dropped him off near a homeless shelter in Phoenix, despite his worsening condition. “What they did was abandonment. They completely killed my son,” Seth Lachka expressed.

Kaelen had been battling anorexia for nearly a decade, but his health had taken a turn for the worse just the year before his hospitalization in August 2025. Initially admitted to a facility, he was transferred to Abrazo Health after experiencing strokes and significant weight loss.

Days before his discharge, Kaelen’s mental state deteriorated; he reportedly became “delusional” and “incapacitated.” On August 13, he became verbally aggressive and requested to leave the hospital “against medical advice,” according to attorney Richard Lyons.

The lawsuit claims that Kaelen was transferred to a wheelchair and then put in an Uber funded by the hospital, taken to a downtown homeless shelter even though he was unable to remember his address. However, his address was available in his medical records, easily retrievable by the staff before he was released.

“They literally pushed him out of the hospital in a wheelchair,” Lyons noted. “This wasn’t a medical discharge; they just didn’t want him as a patient anymore.”

Kaelen was later found on the sidewalk by a police officer, with temperatures soaring that day. “How could you take a seriously ill man out of the hospital and leave him on the sidewalk in mid-August?” Lyons questioned. “Regardless of his ability to make his own decisions, heat can be deadly.”

Seth Lachka was still asleep when he received a call from the hospital about his son’s discharge. When he arrived at the scene, he discovered paramedics performing CPR on Kaelen. “I told them not to release him. They brought him here to die,” he told officers on-site.

Kaelen was subsequently taken to another hospital, where he later passed away. The family’s lawsuit describes Abrazo staff as willfully neglecting Kaelen’s safety and health.

“No one would expect a bar bouncer, let alone a hospital staff member, to dump a helpless customer onto a hot Phoenix sidewalk in mid-August,” the lawsuit states. “What they did goes beyond negligence or malpractice; it directly led to Kaelen’s death.”

Abrazo Health, when approached for a comment on the lawsuit, chose not to respond.