Former workers at Northview Village, the nursing home in north St. Louis that shut down unexpectedly overnight in late 2023, have reached a settlement in a suit they filed against the facility’s owners.
Northview Village shut down after owners reportedly ran out of money to pay employees, sparking a chaotic overnight closure that drew national headlines. Days after, workers filed a class-action lawsuit against the owners, claiming they did not give notice before shutting down the facility.
A state report that recounted the facility’s final hours found the closure endangered the safety of workers and residents.
According to the settlement agreement, which still needs the court’s approval, the facility’s owners will pay around $365,000. The money will go to 184 employees, their lawyers and the company that administers the payout.
It’s about one-fifth of the $1.9 million in damages cited in a 2025 default judgement against Northview, which a judge granted after owners dropped their attorneys and didn’t hire new ones. A federal judge found Northview violated the WARN Act, which typically requires employers to give two months notice before laying off employees.
According to court documents, it took 10 months of discovery for lawyers to find an asset that could cover the payment — an insurance payout found after the court granted the default judgment.
“In plaintiff’s opinion, the likelihood of finding additional assets to which we could attach was slim,” wrote lawyers in court documents.
Lawyers have presented a plan for distributing the settlement sum.
Plaintiffs also secured an $11,000 agreement in a case before the National Labor Relations Board covering unpaid vacation time owed to workers.
“It feels like a two-edged sword,” said Carolyn Hawthorne, a former nurse at Northview and a plaintiff in the suit. “I feel that the employees and the residents also deserve way more than what they found. But I’m appreciative of the fact that the attorneys were diligent in their actions and kept digging and digging until they found some assets that weren’t hidden.”
Federal documents tied to the business indicate at least two of the owners of the facility, Mark Suissa and Eric Rothner, lived in the Chicago area.
If a judge approves the plan, the plaintiffs will start notifying individual employees so they can decide whether to participate, exclude themselves or object to the terms of the agreement.
Finding the money for the settlement was somewhat surprising, said Chris Grant, one of the attorneys representing the Northview workers who also acts as an outside counsel for Service Employees International Union, the union that represents many of the former staffers.
“These entities create various layers of corporate entities – including operating companies, building companies, property management companies, accounting companies – which are then filtered down to the original owners,” he said. “None of this surprises me. The industry has been well-publicized as opaque.”
Former Northview nurse Hawthorne, who has worked in the healthcare industry for 35 years, said she’s considering a new career path.
“It’s disheartening. There’s no other way to describe it,” she said. “It used to be that people went into nursing because they had the care, the compassion, and the competency to take care of people that couldn’t take care of themselves. Now the industry bases everything on numbers.”
The former owners of Northview Village could not be reached for comment.
Republished as part of a content sharing partnership between The St. Louis American and St. Louis Public Radio. Click here to view original story.