October 15, 2026
From the very first intake call, attorney Andrew K. Mitnick understood that this case was about more than a tragic highway death. The issue surfaced quickly that the decedent had been estranged from his father for nearly two decades, and his family did not want the father to benefit from the financial windfall of a lawsuit.
As the family placed their trust in Mitnick to pursue a wrongful death case, they also began confiding a painful family secret: a dark story of sexual abuse, lives forever altered, and the profound impact of a father’s unthinkable harm inflicted upon the children he was supposed to protect.
On the surface, they looked like a typical family. A husband, wife and five kids who resided in a New Jersey suburb. An apparently loving father who had a good job, who played in an adult softball league and who coached his kids’ baseball teams.
But the truth was that at home, the “loving” father was physically and verbally abusive. Over the course of three years, he repeatedly sexually abused two of his daughters when they were just 8-10 years old. Neither sister knew that the other was also a victim. The abuse finally ended when one of the sisters spoke up, even though her father told her that “bad things” would happen to her if she told anyone.
Faced with multiple criminal charges, the father pled guilty to two counts of Second-Degree Sexual Assault and served time in prison.
But despite the father’s heinous actions, his absence left the family financially destabilized, forcing their mother to raise five children alone while constantly battling homelessness. The emotional damage to his daughters was just as profound: one struggled with anger, low self-esteem, rejection, depression and anxiety, while the other battled low self-esteem, depression and anger. One daughter’s pain became so overwhelming that she contemplated and planned suicide on multiple occasions. The abuse touched virtually every part of their lives, affecting their relationships, friendships, family bonds, work, and how they moved through school and their community after the truth came to light. Their brother had even begun the process of changing his name because he did not want to share a name with his father.
An Unthinkable Legal Outcome, Answered with Creative Lawyering
Then tragedy struck again. On a Kentucky highway, the brother was killed at age 29 when improperly secured cargo fell from a flatbed trailer directly into his path of travel.
Mitnick achieved a confidential seven-figure settlement for the family. But because the brother died without a will, the law required the proceeds to be divided evenly between his mother and father, threatening to hand the father the financial windfall that his clients had made clear they wanted to avoid. The injustice of that outcome gnawed at Mitnick, and he knew he had to find a way to stop it.
Mitnick began thinking beyond the confines of the wrongful death case. In 2019, New Jersey amended its Child Sex Abuse Act to give adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse until age 55 to bring civil claims, a change driven by public outrage over institutions that had shielded perpetrators and by a growing recognition that survivors often need decades to process their trauma and come forward. Mitnick saw a path forward: file a civil action against the father for sexual abuse, then leverage that lawsuit to recover the father’s share of the wrongful death settlement as damages for the two daughters.
With his clients’ approval, Mitnick filed a federal lawsuit in New Jersey against the father, who had been released from prison and was then living out-of-state. To protect the daughters’ privacy, the lawsuit identified them by pseudonyms rather than by name. The father chose to proceed without an attorney and ultimately agreed that nearly all of his share of the wrongful death settlement would be paid directly from his son’s estate to his two daughters.
“Sometimes justice requires more than winning the case in front of you. It requires looking beyond the obvious claim, finding every lawful path available, and using the legal system creatively to close the gap between what the law allows and what justice requires,” said Mitnick.
For this family, that creativity turned a threatened injustice into a measure of accountability that honored the son they lost and the sisters he loved.
