Nearly seven years after lawyer Hermes Villarreal killed himself while hospitalized in McAllen, the Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Feb. 9 in Rio Grande Regional Hospital Inc., et al. v. Diana Lopez Villarreal, et al.
The main issues are whether the 13th Court of Appeals created a duty for nurses to diagnose and treat psychological illness and whether the respondents established proximate cause — specifically, was the suicide foreseeable, and were the two nurses’ alleged acts or omissions the cause-in-fact of Villarreal’s death?
