Lawsuit alleges the State of Oregon through the actions of the Oregon State Hospital and staff are responsible for the extreme neglect and abuse during Kenneth’s three-year stay at OSH, violating his constitutional rights and culminating in his wrongful death.
PORTLAND, OR – Sierra Hass, as representative of the Estate of Kenneth Hass, today filed a civil lawsuit against the State of Oregon through the Oregon Health Authority, Oregon State Hospital, and several members of its staff for negligence, physical and mental abuse, and violations of Kenneth’s protections under the Constitution, culminating in his wrongful death. The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in Portland.
On March 30, 2022, Kenneth was transferred to Oregon State Hospital for treatment to restore his ability to assist in his criminal defense, after being charged with two counts of assaulting a public safety officer and criminal trespass in the second degree. Weeks earlier, a medical evaluation had found he presented behaviors suggestive of delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thoughts, and that he was not fit to assist in his own defense.
Oregon State Hospital’s Vision statement reads simply:
- “We are a psychiatric hospital that inspires hope, promotes safety and supports recovery for all.”
Kenneth spent the last three years of his life at Oregon State Hospital until his tragic death in March 2025. His experience there was neither hopeful, nor safe, nor was his recovery at all supported.
During his time at OSH, he was never given a proper diagnosis. His intake diagnosis, “unspecified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder,” is considered a diagnosis of exclusion, essentially a placeholder rather than an identified illness. That label never changed. Doctors cycled through possible explanations, including catatonia, delirium, and mania, and repeatedly altered his medications to an often-dangerous degree, but never settled on an actual diagnosis or built any semblance of a treatment plan.
What replaced treatment was confinement. Hass spent more than a third of his time at OSH, including the entirety of his final 250 days there, in locked seclusion, a practice functionally identical to solitary confinement in a prison. Staff justified Kenneth’s seclusion as necessary to protect his own safety and that of hospital staff. Federal law requires that restraint and seclusion be used only to ensure immediate physical safety and be discontinued at the earliest possible time. This standard was ignored thousands of times. Additionally, Kenneth spent over 500 hours in seclusion tied to the bed in four-point restraints, causing repeated bedsores, sepsis infections, and mental anguish.
Prolonged seclusion is widely understood to cause physical decline, cognitive deterioration, and deeply worsening psychiatric symptoms in anyone subjected to it, independent of any underlying mental illness. For Kenneth, that isolation played out in a room constantly smeared with feces and pooled in urine and trash, conditions they recorded again and again but routinely failed to clean or address.
Not long after Kenneth’s final seclusion period began, his treating psychiatrist, James Peykanu, remarked that he ‘presents in many ways as having a terminal psychotic illness.’ ‘Terminal psychotic illness’ is not a recognized medical term. Dr. Peykanu appears to have invented it, and it meant one thing: Kenneth’s own doctor expected him to die at OSH.
On March 18, 2025, after nearly eight months of seclusion, staff unlocked Kenneth’s bathroom door despite his long-documented habit of drinking from the toilet, a compulsion consistent with psychogenic polydipsia, a well-known psychiatric condition doctors at Oregon State Hospital never diagnosed him with despite years of evidence. Over the following hours, Kenneth drank nearly 90 cups of water from the toilet while staff assigned to watch him failed to intervene or even document it. He then fell from the toilet, struck his head, and began to vomit, choke, and convulse.
For more than four minutes, staff gathered around outside of his door, listening and watching Kenneth struggle, but did not provide any aid until he stopped breathing. Forty-seven minutes later, Kenneth was pronounced dead, his cause of death being water intoxication.
“Kenneth Hass was committed to Oregon State Hospital to receive the psychiatric care he needed. Instead, he endured three years of misconduct so extreme that staff turned his anticipated death into a running joke,” said Tom D’Amore and Ben Turner of D’Amore Law Group and Michelle Burrows of Michelle R. Burrows P.C., attorneys for Kenneth’s estate. “This wasn’t just medical malpractice. It was a violation of Kenneth’s most basic constitutional rights to safety and dignity. We intend to hold the state of Oregon fully accountable, and force real change so no other patient endures what Kenneth did.”
Kenneth’s mistreatment and death are unfortunately just one example of OSH’s many failures. In 2024, OSH ranked ninth highest among similar institutions nationwide for its use of seclusion. In 2025, the Oregon Health Authority reported 21 patient deaths in just the past five years, nine of them unexpected, with multiple involving patients who’d been placed in seclusion. Despite decades of negative outside audits, peer reviews, internal evaluations, lawsuits, and political shifts, the facility has remained largely unchanged. Rather than improve, OSH has continued to allow the horrific treatment that Kenneth and other patients experienced.
“Kenneth experienced so much abuse as a child, and yet he was the greatest protector and friend to myself, my children, everyone. Kenneth deserved respect and dignity like any other person, and the hospital failed to acknowledge this and caused him to suffer for so many years. I believe this lawsuit will bring about whatever form of justice can be left in this situation,” said Sierra Hass. “Kenneth would be honored to know that his death can serve to change how those still living at the hospital are treated. I find comfort in the fact that my brother is resting peacefully in Heaven and is no longer suffering in that horrible place. Nothing will ever fill the hole in our hearts that his passing has left. I will never let my children forget about their uncle, and I hope to teach them to be as brave and loving as he was.”
The lawsuit asserts nine claims for relief, including violations of Kenneth’s Fourteenth Amendment constitutional rights, negligence, physical abuse of a vulnerable person, fraud, and negligent infliction of emotional distress, alongside a wrongful death claim on behalf of his estate. Plaintiffs are also seeking injunctive and declaratory relief, calling for outside expert review of the hospital’s policies and practices and court-ordered oversight to ensure lasting change.