Hospital ordered to pay damages to family of killed Stephen Rose Relatives of a man strangled to death by his mentally ill friend on an isolated highway have been awarded more than $250,000 in damages from Taree's Manning Base Hospital. Stephen Rose was driving William Pettigrove from the hospital to his mother's house in regional Victoria when Mr Pettigrove suddenly attacked and killed him on the Newell Highway at about 8.30pm on July 21, 2004. Mr Pettigrove had been compulsorily detained in the hospital under mental health legislation the previous day after suffering an acute psychotic episode. But a hospital psychiatrist, Warwick Coombes, decided Mr Pettigrove was well enough to be discharged after Mr Rose agreed to drive him home to Echuca, where he was well known to local mental health services and could resume his regular treatment. When the men stopped a few hours later for a toilet break in a "rural location" about 25 kilometres south of Dubbo, Mr Pettigrove, without any forewarning, attacked Mr Rose, who died before police and ambulance arrived. Before his subsequent suicide, Mr Pettigrove told police he had acted on impulse under the belief his friend had killed him in a past life. Mr Rose's mother, Sheila Simon, and his sisters, Merryn McKenna and Wendy Rose, sued the Hunter and New England Local Health District for damages due to nervous shock and psychiatric injury they suffered as a result of his death. They claimed the hospital owed them and Mr Rose a common law duty of care, which it breached by discharging Mr Pettigrove from the psychiatric ward into Mr Rose's custody for the road trip while he was still mentally ill and effectively unmedicated. The family argued Mr Pettigrove, who had a history of not taking his medication during his 20-year history of chronic paranoid schizophrenia, should have been kept in the psychiatric ward long enough - either voluntarily or involuntarily - to be treated with long lasting injections of long-acting anti-psychotic drugs. Dr Coombes only gave Mr Pettigrove comparatively short-acting oral medication so he would not be sedated as the men planned to share the driving. Mr Pettigrove had no history of violence and had not made threats to harm others although he was psychotic and had thoughts of suicide. In 2012 the NSW District Court found Mr Rose's family had not established negligence on the part of the hospital, and, in any event, that his death and their resulting injuries were not caused by the negligence. That decision was overturned recently by the NSW Court of Appeal with two judges finding the hospital owed Mr Rose a common law duty of care to take reasonable care to prevent Mr Pettigrove causing him physical harm. Justices Margaret Beazley and Robert Macfarlan said the hospital had "control over the source of risk to Mr Rose" as Dr Coombes met with Mr Rose in the hospital to discuss the case and released Mr Pettigrove into his care. There was a "foreseeable and not insignificant risk of serious harm" to Mr Rose and a reasonable person would have continued to keep Mr Pettigrove in involuntary detention, the judges said. Mr Rose was vulnerable in the sense that he implicitly relied on the hospital's judgment concerning Mr Pettigrove's fitness to travel with him.