North Miami Beach, Florida — A Miami-Dade County jury handed down one of the largest nursing home neglect verdicts in the county’s history this February, awarding a Florida family $14.7 million after their 82-year-old father died from severe pressure wounds while in the care of Krystal Bay Nursing and Rehabilitation.
The verdict was a win on paper. Whether the Brakes family ever sees a dollar is another matter entirely.
Horace Brakes Jr. had lived at the North Miami Beach facility for two years. His children say they raised concerns about his care repeatedly during that time. On one visit, a daughter found him on the floor. When he was rushed to the hospital for heart issues, the attending physician was so disturbed by what he saw that he said it directly: the patient had clearly not been receiving proper care. Brakes died the next day.
Three years after his death, the jury agreed. Its $14.7 million award to the Brakes family for wrongful death stands as one of the county’s largest verdicts against a long-term care facility.
The LLC Disappearing Act
The verdict came down. Then the legal maneuvering began.
The principals behind Watercrest Acquisitions and Royal Meridian Management Corp. — the companies that owned and managed Krystal Bay when Brakes was a resident — dissolved both LLCs after the lawsuit was filed. No one appeared in court to represent the nursing home’s former ownership or management.
“They took the strategy of ‘we’re just not going to respond, we think we’re judgment proof, we’re just going to dissolve these LLCs and then tell the family good luck getting blood from a stone,'” said Garrick Harding, the family’s attorney at Senior Justice Law Firm in Boca Raton. “That’s the only explanation that can come from their conduct.”
Harding says he’s pursuing the individuals behind the dissolved companies and working with debt collection attorneys to recover what’s owed. “You don’t get to just fold up shop and run away from your responsibilities,” he said.
Florida’s Insurance Gap
What makes the situation harder is Florida’s regulatory structure. The state requires nursing homes to carry liability insurance as a condition of licensure — but doesn’t mandate a minimum coverage amount. In practice, many facilities carry little to none, according to attorneys who handle nursing home neglect cases.
That gap has turned large jury awards into frustrating legal endurance contests. Another attorney had won a $1.2 million verdict against Watercrest in 2025 on behalf of a different family and is still trying to collect. “People don’t think about the fact that if something goes wrong in a Florida nursing home, they won’t have recourse,” he said. “In theory they’re supposed to carry insurance, but in reality, they don’t.”
A Pattern That Goes Beyond One Facility
The principals behind Watercrest are connected to at least three other Florida nursing homes — in Plantation, Bradenton, and Stuart — all of whose ownership and management companies have also been dissolved. Workers at Krystal Bay were separately found to be owed back pay after a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled in March 2025 that the transfer of facility operations violated their collective bargaining agreement.
It’s not the first time a verdict has exposed this pattern. Across the country, families are discovering that winning in court is only the beginning — a dynamic that mirrors accountability failures increasingly documented nationwide. A Maryland nursing home settlement after two residents died earlier this month drew similar attention to how regulators and courts are forced to step in when internal oversight breaks down.
The Brakes family says they’re not walking away. “I don’t think anyone should have to suffer the way he did,” said Rasheedah Warner, one of Horace’s daughters. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Harding put it plainly: “We’re going to hold them accountable. We’re going to chase them to the end of the Earth.”
