Police documents show that a patient allegedly killed another patient at a Landmark Recovery facility in Louisville, Kentucky.

The death adds another troubling entry to the company’s litany of bad news. The Nashville, Tennessee-based addiction treatment facility operator has self-reported the incident to Kentucky regulators and the Joint Commission, Matt Boyle, CEO and founder of Landmark Recovery, told Addiction Treatment Business.

On Feb. 9, local law enforcement and emergency medical services personnel responded to the Praxis of Louisville by Landmark Recovery and found a 48-year-old woman unresponsive. She was pronounced dead at the University of Louisville Hospital that night. Police arrested the alleged perpetrator on Feb. 11 on a charge of attempted murder. That charge was later raised to a murder charge in court following the coroner’s report, which found the victim’s death was a homicide caused by strangulation, according to local news media.

“The above subject was interviewed by detectives and stated, ‘She wanted to die, so I killed her,’” the police report states. 

The police report states that that incident took place at about 8:53 p.m. on Feb. 9. Investigators said they reviewed facility security film showing the alleged perpetrator entering the victim’s room at that time. The victim was discovered by staff at 9:57 p.m., the police report states.

Boyle told BHB that patients of Praxis of Louisville by Landmark Recovery are not allowed to enter other patient’s rooms. At the time of the incident, the facility was hosting a Super Bowl party in the dining room; a nurse in the next room was also passing out medication. None of the staff, according to Boyle, reported to him hearing a disturbance.

Boyle also asserts that local staff conducted the necessary assessments to admit the accused perpetrator to that level of care.

This is the fifth patient since 2023 to die in a Landmark Recovery facility, the second to die by violent means. In one week in July 2023, three patients at the company’s facility in Mishawaka, Indiana, died. One died by suicide. The others died from a toxic combination of drugs used in detox and chronic alcoholism. Indiana state officials revoked the licensure for three of the four Landmark Recovery facilities operating in the state at the time following the news of the deaths and revelations of a large volume of law enforcement engagements at these facilities, especially for the Mishawaka facility. Later that year, another patient died in a facility in Willard, Ohio.

Landmark Recovery appealed the license revocation and reached a settlement with Indiana officials, allowing the company to eventually reopen the facilities. However, Landmark may not actually operate the facilities.

“We have no plans to open any additional facilities in Indiana but are proud of the work we did to demonstrate to the state that we are a transformed company,” Boyle told WTHR/13News. He also told WTHR that the company’s previous effort to reestablish the facilities is part of his work with organizations he did not name that would eventually take them over. However, that work has apparently stalled.

When ATB asked about Praxis of Louisville by Landmark Recovery facility, Boyle said, “We have no intention to close the facility.”

While the three Indiana facilities remain defunct, Landmark Recovery no longer operates the Willard, Ohio facility. It is now operated by Seacrest Recovery Center, a Boynton Beach, Florida-based addiction treatment provider. For a brief while, Landmark Recovery’s landlord of the Willard facility, Waterstone Properties, took receivership of the facility after Landmark failed to pay rent. But the court returned the facility to Landmark Recovery after reaching a “global settlement,” publicly available documents show. Landmark Recovery was evicted from facilities in Las Vegas and Oklahoma in 2023.

The company previously had plans to operate as many as 40 facilities by the end of 2023. Today, it operates nine facilities.

Landmark Recovery has had many legal disputes involving nonpayment bubble up in the federal courts. Most recently, Landmark was sued by one of the largest institutional pharmacy providers, PharMerica, after not making good on a previously worked-out forbearance agreement for nonpayment. A previous review of federal legal documents shows that Landmark is facing or has resolved litigation with three staffing agencies.

The company is also staring down the barrel of trials related to sexual abuse. In Indiana state court, a lawsuit alleging that Landmark Recovery was negligent in its management of the Mishawaka facility and alleging that a male patient sexually assaulted the plaintiff is set to go to trial in November. A former administrator at Landmark Recovery sued the company in February 2024 over alleged violations of a settlement agreement that would resolve allegations that Landmark Recovery owner and chairman, Clifford Boyle, Matt Boyle’s father, sexually harassed the employee. The judge over that case set a trial for March 3, 2026.

Part of the claims in the Mishawaka sexual assault lawsuit also include allegations that Landmark Recovery staff failed to prohibit patients from entering other patient’s rooms.