Robert Carradine’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit on Aug. 7, saying the 71-year-old actor’s February suicide at a UCLA-affiliated psychiatric facility was preventable. The complaint was lodged in Los Angeles Superior Court and names the UC regents, along with physicians, nurses, clinical care partners and other officials identified as Does 1-100.
The filing is the first public move by Carradine’s estate and surviving children since his death, and it puts the focus on what happened inside UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Westwood. The family says Carradine voluntarily walked into the hospital asking for help, and that he died about 19 hours later after entering care for safety.
In the lawsuit, the family says Carradine told staff he had bipolar disorder and suicidal thoughts when he checked in. It says he walked into a locked psychiatric unit with a belt, a detail the complaint casts as a failure of basic screening. The suit also says hospital staff left him in a room with a table that had not been removed, were distracted during his observation intake and then left him without proper checks despite orders to watch him every 15 minutes.
Those allegations are the core of the family’s argument that the death was not only tragic but avoidable. The complaint says UCLA staff falsified records to make it appear proper care had been delivered and that the hospital gave Carradine the means to hurt himself. In the family’s telling, he was not sent away from danger; he was led into it after asking to be kept safe.
The lawsuit also frames the case as one of recklessness, elder abuse and neglect at a university health facility. It says the failures were not the result of missing rules or tools, but of shortcuts that bypassed safeguards meant to protect a patient at obvious risk. UCLA Health and the UC regents have not publicly answered the complaint in the materials reviewed here.
Carradine was best known for the Revenge of the Nerds films, but the legal fight now centers on the care he received in his final hours. The complaint moves next into Los Angeles Superior Court, where the defendants will have to answer whether a patient who came in seeking protection was left exposed to the very harm he feared.
