A mother's wrongful death civil lawsuit against the teen who killed her 9-year-old daughter has been dismissed. Confidentiality of the teen's patient records may have doomed the lawsuit.
Patricia Preiss filed the nine-page lawsuit Oct. 18, 2012, against Alyssa Bustamante, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to second-degree murder for killing Elizabeth Olten on Oct. 21, 2009, and is serving a life sentence, plus 30 years for armed criminal action, at the state's Women's Eastern Reception and Diagnostic Center, Vandalia.
Bustamante, who was a neighbor to the Oltens, was 15 when Olten died, and confessed to the murder Jan. 10, 2012 - just 18 days before her 18th birthday.
The dismissal of the lawsuit occurred at a hearing Friday in Cole County Circuit Judge Jon Beetem's court.
The docket entry for the case shows the case was dismissed "without prejudice for failure to prosecute."
Preiss sued Bustamante, Pathways Behavioral Healthcare and two of its employees - Ron Wilson, a counselor who had worked with Bustamante, and Dr. Niger Sultana, a psychiatrist.
In March 2014, St. Louis County lawyer Bruce R. Bartlett, representing Preiss, dismissed
Pathways, Dr. Sultana and Wilson as defendants.
The action in Preiss' civil suit came at the same time Cole County Presiding Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce rejected Bustamante's motion to set aside her guilty plea and prison sentences. Bustamante's public defender lawyers had counseled her to plead guilty to a second-degree murder charge rather than going to trial on the first-degree charge a Cole County grand jury had issued in November 2009, within two hours of the teen's certification to be tried as an adult.
Her new criminal case attorney, Gary Brotherton of Columbia, had argued that Public Defenders Donald Catlett and Charles Moreland failed to wait to see if the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn state laws requiring a mandatory life-in-prison-without-parole sentence for a first-degree murder conviction of a person who was under 18 when the crime was committed.
Also, he argued, the public defenders should have taken her case to trial and pressed a jury for a better sentence.
But Bustamante's trial was set for early 2012 - months before the U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled to hear that case.
And, Joyce wrote on March 6, 2014: "The evidence against (Bustamante) was both strong and aggravating, and this plainly would not favor her at any trial. Her attorneys were correct in assessing the strength of the State's case against (her)."
After a two-day sentencing hearing in February 2012, Joyce ordered Bustamante to serve a life term in prison, with a possibility of parole, for the second-degree murder conviction, to be followed by a 30-year sentence for Bustamante's conviction of armed criminal action in the case.
She admitted to strangling and then stabbing Olten, in the woods behind Bustamante's grandparents' home on Route D (Lomo Drive), just south of the St. Martins exit from U.S. 50 West.
Olten's family lived in a rented home at the opposite end of the small group of houses from Bustamante's home, and Olten was friends with Bustamante's younger sister.
In the lawsuit, Preiss accused Pathways and its employees of failing to warn Elizabeth and her family that Bustamante was a threat to Olten's life.
Attorney Matthew P. Diehr, of St. Louis County, wrote in the lawsuit, "Bustamante's violent propensities were well-documented from a young age, including but not limited to a declaration on her "MySpace' page that her hobbies were "cutting; killing people,' a video wherein Bustamante electrocuted (sic) her younger brothers, a picture of Bustamante holding a knife to another girl's throat, and other evidence."
Diehr also wrote Pathways' employees "were aware of the same violent propensities of Bustamante, as well as the specific, identifiable threats to harm Olten (but), despite actual knowledge of the threat Bustamante posed to Olten, none of these defendants took actions to detain Bustamante, none took action to result in her detention, none warned Olten or Preiss of the specific threat on Olten, nor did they take any action that might have prevented Bustamante from harming Olten."
In July 2013, Diehr complained to Beetem that Pathways had blocked his efforts to get Bustamante's medical records as part of the discovery process.
However, Beetem noted state laws and previous court rulings gave Pathways' attorneys little choice but to protect the privacy of Bustamante's records.
"Medical providers are required to assert privilege," Beetem said during a July 10, 2013, hearing in open court. "It's not like they are trying to be obstructive."
Court records show Pathways continued to oppose Preiss' efforts to see the records, while at the same time demanding Preiss, according to one docket entry, "disclose what facts, documents, and evidence they have or are aware of which indicates that Elizabeth Olten was a readily, identifiable victim."
Beetem ordered Preiss and her attorneys to comply with Pathways' demand and, in that same docket entry, ordered the "production of any document, not produced and claimed as privileged, which references Elizabeth Olten or other readily identifiable victim."
Although Preiss dropped Pathways, Sultana and Wilson as defendants in the case, that dismissal was "without prejudice" - meaning they still could be sued about the Olten murder at some point in the future.
And Beetem's ruling Friday also was "without prejudice," leaving Preiss free to file another suit against Bustamante, now 21, in the future.