A civil trial over one of the most serious patient-on-staff attacks at a Rhode Island hospital in recent memory ended almost as soon as it began. According to WPRI-12’s Target 12, the lawsuit nurse Scott Amaral filed against Allied Universal, the security contractor at Rhode Island Hospital, settled on Oct. 8 — one day after jurors in Providence Superior Court watched video of the 2023 attack that left him with what his lawsuit calls serious and permanent injuries.
Amaral’s attorney declined to disclose the settlement terms, citing a confidentiality agreement. But the timing speaks for itself: a trial that opened with statements from both sides, and included jurors seeing footage of the attack, ended in a deal less than 24 hours later.
What happened on the psychiatric unit
The attack happened Sept. 8, 2023, on a psychiatric unit at Rhode Island Hospital, part of Brown University Health. According to a police report cited in reporting on the case, a patient became upset over his phone privileges shortly before Amaral entered the patient’s room to check on him. Prosecutors have accused that patient, George Bower, of assaulting Amaral; he was charged with felony assault, assault of a health care provider, and disorderly conduct, and has since faced new assault charges in a separate case.
Amaral’s civil case wasn’t against the patient or the hospital itself — it was against Allied Universal, the private security firm Rhode Island Hospital contracts to staff its units. His lawsuit alleged negligent hiring, negligent training, and negligent assignment of the guards on duty that night, and claimed two guards failed to intervene while he was attacked.
Psychiatric units are some of the highest-acuity, least-protected spaces in any hospital, and the staff working them are almost never the ones who decide how many guards are on the floor or how those guards are trained to respond. When a nurse is seriously hurt doing that job, the question that actually matters isn’t just what the patient did — it’s whether the people paid to have his back actually did.
The defense, and what wasn’t argued
Allied Universal’s attorney, Kurt Rocha, told the court the company wasn’t trying to minimize what happened to Amaral, but argued the negligence case against the company rested on “a chain of assumptions” about what properly trained guards would have done differently. That argument didn’t survive contact with the video evidence for long; the case settled the next day, before the defense could finish making its case to the jury.
Brown University Health, which operates Rhode Island Hospital, was not named as a defendant in Amaral’s lawsuit. The health system has confirmed that Allied Universal remains its security contractor at the hospital.
A pattern hospitals keep paying for
Workplace violence against nurses and other direct-care staff has become one of the most consistent cost centers in American hospital litigation, and settlements like this one rarely come with public accounting of what, if anything, changed in staffing or training afterward. The confidentiality that comes standard with these deals means the next nurse working the same unit, under the same security contract, often has no way of knowing a jury was ever shown video of what can happen there.