The family of actor Robert Carradine has filed a wrongful death and elder abuse lawsuit against the University of California, alleging a UCLA psychiatric facility let him keep a belt and left him unmonitored, failures that proved fatal.
Carradine, best known for his starring role in "Revenge of the Nerds" and his recurring part on "Lizzie McGuire," checked himself into a UCLA neuropsychiatric hospital in January after experiencing suicidal thoughts. He had battled bipolar disorder for nearly two decades. The lawsuit, filed August 7 by his estate against the Regents of the University of California, alleges the facility broke its own safety protocols within hours of his arrival, and that those failures cost him his life.
The complaint, first reported by USA TODAY, lays out a grim sequence: Carradine arrived at the locked psychiatric unit voluntarily, hoping for rest and relief. Nineteen hours later, he attempted suicide. Staff found him unresponsive and in cardiac arrest. He spent five weeks in an intensive care unit before dying of complications from anoxic brain injury, the result of oxygen being completely cut off from his brain.
At the center of the lawsuit is a single item: a belt. The complaint states that UCLA's own written policy lists belts and buckles as contraband for patients in its psychiatric units. Removing belts, shoelaces, and drawstrings from patients with suicidal ideation is standard practice across psychiatric facilities nationwide. Yet when Carradine was admitted, the belongings intake form shows staff "failed to confiscate" the belt.
The lawsuit calls confiscating items that could be used to "cause self-harm" the "cardinal rule for a hospitalized psychiatric patient with active suicidal thoughts and a history of suicide attempts." UCLA staff did not follow that rule.
And the failures did not stop at the intake desk. The complaint alleges that "no one watched him or checked on him for long periods of time", a second critical lapse in a facility specifically designed to house patients at risk of harming themselves.
The filing is blunt about blame:
"None of this happened because UCLA lacked the knowledge, the policies or the means. It happened because UCLA took shortcuts with two safeguards that were meant to protect Robert's life."
That language frames the case not as a gap in institutional knowledge but as a failure to execute procedures UCLA already had on the books. The university knew what to do. Its staff simply did not do it, the family contends.
One of the most striking details in the complaint is that Carradine wanted to be there. He felt "relieved to be hospitalized," the lawsuit states, and hoped treatment would allow him to rest and "reduce his anxiety." He walked into a locked facility designed for patients in psychiatric crisis, trusting that its staff would keep him safe while he was at his most vulnerable.
That trust lasted less than a day. Nineteen hours after admission, he attempted suicide. The next detail the filing provides is that he was discovered unresponsive and in cardiac arrest. His condition never recovered. Over five weeks in the ICU, it continued to decline until he died.
The medical examiner's report, previously obtained by USA TODAY, confirmed the cause of death as sequelae of anoxic brain injury, a clinical way of saying the damage done when his brain was starved of oxygen proved irreversible.
The lawsuit adds another layer: a cover-up allegation. After Carradine's death, the family claims the facility "did not investigate reality" and instead maintained "a version of events in the records that the surveillance video contradicted." The complaint does not detail exactly what the video shows or how the records differ, but the implication is clear, the family believes UCLA's internal account of what happened does not match what the cameras captured.
That allegation transforms the case from a negligence claim into something more troubling. If the facility's records were crafted to obscure what actually occurred, the family is not just alleging incompetence. They are alleging institutional dishonesty after a patient died on UCLA's watch.
USA TODAY reported it reached out to both the Regents of the University of California and Carradine's lawyer for comment. No response from the Regents was included in the reporting. The estate is seeking general damages, special and economic damages, and wrongful damages. No specific dollar amount has been disclosed.
The Carradine lawsuit echoes a broader pattern of institutions facing legal consequences after failing to protect people in their care from foreseeable harm. In 2022, the family of 15-year-old Nate Bronstein filed suit against the Latin School of Chicago after the boy died by suicide following months of relentless bullying. That lawsuit alleged administrators ignored more than 30 warnings from his mother in just two months. A student had even urged Nate to kill himself on Snapchat, yet no one was disciplined.
The common thread is not the specific setting, a psychiatric hospital in one case, a private school in another. It is the gap between what institutions knew and what they did about it. In both cases, the families allege the warning signs were visible, the duty was clear, and the institution chose not to act.
For Carradine's family, the gap is especially stark. UCLA did not need to interpret ambiguous behavior or guess at risk. Carradine arrived with documented suicidal ideation and a history of attempts. The facility's own written policy identified belts as contraband. The safeguards existed on paper. They simply were not applied to the man in the room.
Psychiatric hospitals exist for one reason above all others: to keep patients alive when they cannot keep themselves safe. Every protocol, the contraband lists, the monitoring schedules, the locked doors, flows from that single purpose. When a facility admits a patient who is actively suicidal, confiscates nothing, and checks on no one, it has failed at the most basic level of its mission.
Robert Carradine did what mental health advocates beg people to do. He asked for help. He walked through the door. He told them he was in crisis. The institution that was supposed to catch him let him fall, and then, his family alleges, wrote a version of events the cameras did not support.
If a locked psychiatric ward cannot keep a suicidal patient away from a belt for 19 hours, the lock on the door means nothing.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
