PORTSMOUTH — The family of Nathan Bruno, a 15-year-old Portsmouth High School student who died by suicide in 2018, will be awarded an additional $1,525,893 million in damages stemming from a wrongful death lawsuit, a Superior Court judge has ruled.

In October 2024 following a 13-day trial, a Newport Superior Court jury found that a PHS football coach and school administrators, as well as a Jamestown police detective, acting negligently in causing Nathan to suffer extreme emotional distress that later led to his suicide on Feb. 7, 2018. The verdict awarded the Bruno family $5.4 million in damages.

In a ruling dated June 20, however, Judge Richard A. Licht accepted a request by Nathan’s father, Richard Bruno, to increase the damages to reflect the income his son would have earned had he survived as a high school graduate. (Misty L. Kolbeck, Nathan’s mother and an original co-plaintiff in the suit, passed away in 2023.) The total award, then, would stand at $8.5 million should the original verdict and Licht’s decision hold up.

The Town of Portsmouth, former PHS football coach Ryan Moniz, and school administrators were given the choice to accept the award or seek a new trial on those additional damages — called an additur — alone. 

The judge rejected a motion by the town for a new trial, dismissing the defendant’s challenges to jury instructions, as well as the decision not to allow the jury to hear testimony about text messages he sent to a girl, conflicts with his family, or certain other private texts and e-mails with a classmate.

How the figure was reached

Bruno argued that the jury’s finding of liability against Moniz entitled him to recovery under all categories of damages under the Wrongful Death Act (WDA), including “pecuniary” damages — monetary compensation to cover quantifiable financial losses resulting from injury or death. Leonard Lardaro, an expert in economics who teaches at the University of Rhode Island, testified for the plaintiffs and calculated the income Nathan would have made in his lifetime based on two scenarios: one that assumed he graduated high school, and the other based on average earnings for all white males.

Bruno’s attorneys requested the court do one of the following: Award him $1,525,893 (average earnings by males with only a high school education); $2,204,908 (average earnings by males); or $1,865,400.50 (the average of those two figures). The court went with the lesser figure.

The defendants argued that under the WDA, there was no requirement to award pecuniary damages once a threshold of $250,000 had been reached. The court rejected that line of reasoning.

Background

The lawsuit, which was first filed in November 2019, named as defendants Moniz; Lisa Mills, in her capacity as Portsmouth’s finance director; Stephen Trezvant, PHS athletic director; Joseph Amaral, principal of PHS (now retired); Paige Kirwin-Clair, interim principal of PHS; Christina D. Collins, Jamestown’s finance director; and Derek Carlino, a detective with the Jamestown Police Department.

Jurors found that Moniz, Amaral, Kirwin-Clair, and Carlino were negligent. In addition, the jury found that Moniz’s negligence was a “proximate cause” of Nathan’s mental state that led to his suicide. The jury found that Trezvant was not negligent.

Nathan was a sophomore at PHS when he took his own life in 2018 after accusations he had sent harassing calls and text messages anonymously to Moniz.

According to a 118-page report by Providence-based attorney Matthew T. Oliverio and released by the school district in June 2019, Nathan became distraught after rumors had spread around school that he was one of the students responsible for making the crank phone calls and texts starting in December 2017. Jamestown Detective Derek Carlino determined the messages had been traced to Nathan, and he alerted Moniz.

Rick Bruno arranged a time for his son to apologize to Moniz, who also learned from Carlino that other teenagers were involved in the harassment. That news prompted the coach to pressure Nathan to name those boys, according to the report.

“In summary, Mr. Bruno contends that Head Football Coach Ryan Moniz, Principal Joseph Amaral and Athletic Director (Stephen) Trezvant intentionally or unintentionally placed an undue amount of mental and emotional stress upon his son in the weeks and days leading up to his tragic death, causing the 15-year-old Nathan to feel isolated, shamed and bullied to the point where his only escape from the pressure was to end his life on February 7, 2018,” the report stated.

Moniz was removed as football coach by the Portsmouth School Committee for the 2018-19 year, although he was allowed to continue as a teacher. He has since sued the town over losing his coaching job, a case still pending in Newport Superior Court.

Be Great for Nate

After Nathan’s death, Rick Bruno founded the nonprofit Be Great for Nate, an organization that pushed for mental health resources in public schools. Nathan’s friends formed Every Student Initiative, a student group under BG4N.

In 2021, BG4N celebrated the passage in the General Assembly of The Nathan Bruno and Jason Flatt Act, a suicide prevention training bill that was signed into law by Gov. Daniel McKee. The measure requires all public school districts to adopt suicide prevention policies and train all personnel in suicide awareness and prevention annually.

Be Great for Nate suspended its activities in 2022.