The Ohio Court of Appeals has affirmed a $4,531,700.50 wrongful-death award against the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. The October 1, 2026 decision keeps in place a Court of Claims judgment for the estate of Brooks H. Davison. Counsel of record for the estate included The Becker Law Firm and partner Romney B. Cullers.
The published opinion is Davison v. Ohio State Univ. Wexner Med. Ctr., No. 25AP-150, from the Tenth Appellate District. Judge Mentel wrote the decision. Ohio State had asked the appeals court to undo both the liability finding and the damages award. The court said no. The judgment stands.
LAWS.com first reported the ruling in Ohio Court upholds wrongful death ruling against OSU Medical. The full opinion is also posted on Cases.LAWS.com at Davison v. Ohio State Univ. Wexner Med. Ctr..
What the case decided
Dawn Davison sued as administrator of her husband’s estate. Brooks Davison had a documented history of opioid addiction. For six years before surgery, the opinion says, he maintained sobriety under the care of his primary physician and took Suboxone daily. He had not failed a drug screen during that period.
On February 1, 2016, he underwent spinal fusion surgery at the Wexner Medical Center. The opinion recounts that he had delayed the operation because he feared a relapse. After the procedure, doctors discharged him with a high dose of oxycodone and a prescription for diazepam. He later died of a drug overdose.
The Court of Claims of Ohio, case No. 2018-00127JD, found the medical center liable for wrongful death and awarded $4,531,700.50. The hospital moved for a new trial. That motion was denied. The hospital then appealed.
On appeal, Ohio State argued that Brooks Davison caused his own death by misusing the prescribed drugs. The Tenth District rejected that theory as a reason to reverse. The court held that the medical team breached the standard of care by sending him home on that combination of drugs without proper follow-up, and without giving enough weight to his addiction history.
Given Brooks’s susceptibility to misuse opioid medications, his death was foreseeable and OSUWMC’s actions constituted the proximate cause of Brooks Davison’s death.
That sentence is from the appeals court’s opinion. It is the core of the affirmance. The hospital remains free to seek review in the Supreme Court of Ohio. The October 1 opinion does not say whether it will do so.
The lawyers for the estate
The caption page lists counsel for the appellee — the winning estate — as The Becker Law Firm and Romney B. Cullers; Francis E. Sweeney, Jr. Esq. LLC and Francis E. Sweeney, Jr.; and Paul W. Flowers, who argued the appeal. Ohio’s attorney general’s office represented the hospital.
That is the public record. The Becker firm’s own site, beckerjustice.com, describes a plaintiff practice built around medical negligence, catastrophic injury, birth injury, and wrongful death. The firm says it was founded in 1979 by Mike Becker, a plaintiff’s trial lawyer and a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates. The Inner Circle limits membership to 100 personal-injury lawyers nationwide. The firm says Becker is the only active Ohio member.
Today the firm’s managing partner is Romney Cullers. His attorney profile states that he has tried complex Ohio cases for more than 30 years and joined Becker in 2014. He lists verdict work in wrongful death, birth injury, medical-surgical negligence, product liability, premises liability, and automobile negligence.
The same profile, in his words, reports two results the firm uses to define the practice. In 2016, he obtained a $60.7 million settlement for Gasia Thomas, a child injured by a fallen power line. The firm calls that the largest settlement in Ohio history for injuries to an individual plaintiff. In 2021, he recovered $24 million for a college athlete who suffered a cardiac arrest after basketball practice and, the firm says, did not receive immediate life-saving measures from coaching staff.
The team page also says firm lawyers have obtained “the largest wrongful death verdict in Ohio Court of Claims history.” The Davison Court of Claims award, later affirmed on appeal, is the kind of result that statement describes. LAWS.com is reporting the public opinion and the firm’s published description of its work. It is not repeating confidential case files.
How the firm presents its work
Becker’s homepage opens with a simple claim: “Hundreds of Millions Recovered. Hundreds of Lives Changed.” The site lists other published results, including a $25.5 million birth-injury judgment that the firm says is among the largest medical-malpractice verdicts in Ohio, a $14.5 million cerebral-palsy case against MetroHealth, a $13.5 million Akron birth-injury verdict obtained by Michael Becker and David Skall, and an $11 million policy-limits brain-injury settlement obtained by Becker and David Oeschger, Jr.
Those figures come from the firm. They are the results it chooses to put in front of clients. The Davison appeal sits in the same practice area: a medical-negligence death case against a large hospital system, tried in the Court of Claims and then defended on appeal.
Cullers’s profile adds professional detail that is easy to check. He is a former president of the Cleveland Academy of Trial Attorneys and a Master Bencher in the Judge John M. Manos Inn of Court. He has taught trial tactics, appellate advocacy, and medical malpractice at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. He is a Certified Civil Trial Lawyer with the National Board of Trial Advocacy, which is accredited by the American Bar Association. He lives in Cleveland Heights.
The firm lists offices in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Dayton. Cleveland is the headquarters, at 1111 Superior Avenue East. The public site’s tagline is “Respected. Relentless.” Client comments posted there describe the lawyers as careful with updates and willing to take hard cases. Those comments are testimonials, not court findings.
Why the appeal matters
Hospital-system wrongful-death cases are expensive to try and easy to lose on appeal. The Davison record had a difficult fact for any plaintiff: a patient with a known addiction who died after taking prescribed opioids. The defense asked the appeals court to treat that history as a break in causation. The Tenth District said the risk was foreseeable and that the discharge plan was still a breach.
For other families, the holding is narrow but useful. A history of addiction does not, by itself, wipe out a provider’s duty to prescribe and follow up with care. For the Davison family, the holding is concrete. The $4,531,700.50 judgment remains in force unless a higher court says otherwise.
Readers who want the primary sources can open the Cases.LAWS.com opinion page and the earlier LAWS.com news report, Ohio Court upholds wrongful death ruling against OSU Medical. For the firm’s own account of its lawyers and published results, see The Becker Law Firm.