A jury in Dutchess County, New York has returned a $6.8 million verdict against a nursing home and four of its owners, finding, according to plaintiffs' counsel, that the 62-bed facility was understaffed every single day over a three-year stretch — a pattern the plaintiffs' side says the owners created on purpose to cut costs.
Jurors returned the verdict after a seven-day trial, awarding $3.2 million in compensatory damages and $3.6 million in punitive damages against Sapphire Nursing at Wappingers, LLC and one of its owners, Richard Platschek. The jury also found four individual defendants — Platschek, Machla Abramczyk, Esther Farkovits, and Robert Schuck — personally liable as controlling owners of the facility, meaning the verdict reaches beyond the corporate entity itself.
A class action built on a state law most people have never heard of
The case was brought under New York Public Health Law 2801-d, a statute that gives nursing home residents (or their estates) a private right to sue a facility directly for violating their rights under state or federal regulations — including minimum staffing standards. A state court certified a class covering every patient who resided at Sapphire between 2017 and 2020.
The lead plaintiff, Susan Schmidt, sued on behalf of her mother, who lived at the facility before her death in 2021. Plaintiffs' attorneys at Cohen Milstein argued that the moment the current owners took control of Sapphire in 2017, they began dramatically cutting staffing levels to improve the facility's bottom line.
What the evidence showed
Plaintiffs pointed to a 2018 New York State Department of Health inspection report that documented severe aide shortages at the facility — shortages so bad that residents were left in their beds for hours at a time, with delayed incontinence and other basic care. That inspection record, combined with testimony and medical evidence about residents' care, was central to convincing the jury that the understaffing wasn't an occasional bad week, but the facility's normal operating condition for three straight years.
The jury found the nursing home was understaffed every day of the class period.Cohen Milstein, plaintiffs' counsel
Sapphire's defense called the verdict "against the weight of evidence" and says it is pursuing post-trial motions. The owners denied deliberately understaffing the facility to boost profits and argued that Sapphire met state and federal staffing requirements. No deadline for those motions had been reported as of this writing.
I've worked short more nights than I can count, and the part of this case that should stick with floor staff isn't the dollar figure — it's that a state inspection report from 2018 became the backbone of a seven-figure verdict eight years after it was written. Document everything: the nights you're the only aide for 20 residents, the call bells nobody answered, the incident reports management didn't want filed. That paper trail is exactly what turned "we were short again" into a jury verdict holding the owners personally liable.
A second, unrelated Sapphire case went the other way
This isn't the only lawsuit against a facility operating under the Sapphire name. McKnight's reported in 2025 that a Sapphire nursing home had won an earlier class action, a 2018 suit by nearly 900 people that sought $114 million — a reminder that these cases turn on the specific evidence a jury sees, not the name on the building.