Robert Carradine family lawsuit was filed on Aug. 7 in Los Angeles Superior Court, putting the UC regents and UCLA psychiatric care under legal scrutiny after the actor’s February death. The 27-page complaint says the 71-year-old’s suicide at UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Westwood was preventable.
His estate and surviving children accuse the psychiatric care team at the UCLA health facility of elder abuse and neglect. They say Carradine had checked into the hospital shortly before his death and had admitted suicidal thoughts, which should have triggered tighter controls inside a locked unit.
27-Page Complaint in Los Angeles
The lawsuit names the UC regents as defendants and identifies physicians, nurses, clinical care partners and other officials as Does 1-100. Filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, the complaint puts responsibility on the governing body of UCLA rather than on a single bedside worker, a move that broadens the case beyond one shift or one room.
That framing also raises the stakes for any response from UCLA Health for the alleged failures. Carradine’s family says he voluntarily walked into a psychiatric hospital to be kept safe, and that he knew he was not safe to be left alone. In that telling, the case turns on whether the system that received him matched the promise of the setting.
Safeguards at UCLA Resnick
The complaint says UCLA let him walk into a locked psychiatric unit with a belt and left him in a room with a table that had not been removed from his unit before being placed there. It also says no one watched over him or checked on him for long periods of time despite orders to watch him every 15 minutes.
Those are not small lapses in a psychiatric setting. They go to the core of suicide precautions: removing means, controlling access, and keeping the observation schedule tight enough to catch a deterioration before it becomes fatal. The complaint says UCLA staff were distracted during Carradine’s observation intake and falsified records to reflect proper care.
“He asked for help. He recognized that he was a danger to himself and voluntarily walked into a psychiatric hospital to be kept safe,” the family said in a statement reviewed by The Times. “He knew he was not safe to be left alone.”
Revenge of the Nerds Star
Born on March 24, 1954, in Los Angeles, Carradine was the youngest son of John Carradine. He made his debut in a 1971 episode of Bonanza and his first film appearance was in The Cowboys in 1972, before becoming best known for the 1980s Revenge of the Nerds movies.
The lawsuit’s central claim is simple and severe: “Instead of walking into a safe environment, [Carradine] walked into a locked facility that broke a cardinal rule for a hospitalized psychiatric patient with active suicidal thoughts and a history of suicide attempts.” The civil complaint adds, “None of this happened because UCLA lacked the knowledge, the policies or the means” and “It happened because UCLA took shortcuts with two safeguards that were meant to protect Robert’s life.”
The filing leaves the immediate legal burden on the UC regents and the unnamed care team, and it asks a court to decide whether the alleged failures in observation and access control amount to negligence severe enough to support a wrongful-death case. The strongest reading of the complaint is also the plainest: if those allegations hold, the problem was not the diagnosis but the handling of a patient who had already asked to be protected.
