Diandra “Fu” Debrosse

When the officers of the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office came to move Glenn Foster Jr. on December 6, 2021, he was restrained at the wrists, the ankles and the waist, and he was physically unresponsive. A county judge had ordered him examined in person at a medical center, on his family’s petition to have him declared incompetent. His widow’s lawsuit describes what came next: Jail Administrator Justin White “yank[ed]” Foster by the neck from behind and pulled him into the transport vehicle while Sheriff Todd Hall, two deputies and four corrections officers looked on.

Foster reached the medical center in Northport “unresponsive and foaming at the mouth and nostrils,” his skin discolored. Medical staff performed chest compressions for thirty minutes and then pronounced him dead. He was thirty-one years old and had been in the Pickens County Jail since the night of December 3.

By December 10, Diandra “Fu” Debrosse was speaking for his family alongside the civil-rights lawyer Benjamin Crump. She had joined DiCello Levitt that June to lead its new office in Birmingham. “[Law enforcement] denied him both his liberty and his safety,” she said. “It is appalling and unacceptable that he wound up dead on their watch. His family told police that he struggled with mental health issues, and they sought to pick him up and take him for treatment.” “Instead of ensuring that he was treated appropriately and getting him the care he needed, they recklessly took his life,” she added.

Five months later, a federal judge in Chicago appointed Debrosse co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the national litigation against Abbott Laboratories and Mead Johnson over the formula fed to premature babies in hospital neonatal units. She has carried both kinds of case since: one widow’s civil-rights claims against the sheriff, deputies and jailers who held her husband, and the product claims of thousands of families against the two companies that dominate the American formula market.

Three Days in the Pickens County Jail

Foster had played defensive end at the University of Illinois and signed with the New Orleans Saints in 2013, appearing in seventeen games and two playoff games over two seasons before he left the league. He was listed at six-foot-four and 285 pounds, and after football he owned businesses in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. By December 2021 he was married to Pamela Foster and was the father of four young children. His family has said he had lived for about ten years with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

Late on the night of December 3, Reform police officers and Pickens County deputies stopped Foster for alleged reckless driving and arrested him. The family’s lawsuit alleges that they wrestled him to the ground and struck his head against the concrete before taking him to the Pickens County Jail.

The next day the Reform police chief told the family about the arrest. Foster’s father told the chief that his son suffered from mental-health problems that impaired his judgment and made him especially agitated under stress, and he asked that Foster be moved to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. The chief agreed. On December 5 the family paid Foster’s bond and went to the jail to take him for treatment. They were not allowed to see him, and Sheriff Hall refused to release him to them.

That evening, Deputy Mickey Young and Corrections Officer LaDon Hill took Foster from his cell and restrained him in a chair in another one. Pamela Foster alleges that they choked him, stripped him naked, poured water on him, and tased him repeatedly. He “fell over onto the floor and vomited blood.” They kept tasing him until he lost consciousness, and after.

Overnight, a jail employee called emergency medical services to check his vital signs. When the medics arrived, the estate alleges, Hall, White and Young kept them from completing an examination. The medics recommended that Foster be taken to a hospital; the officers refused, and he spent the night without any medical evaluation or treatment.

The family’s lawsuit alleges that the way officers forced Foster into the transport vehicle the next day injured his neck and contributed to his death that same day. The family has said that officials later told them body-camera footage of the arrest had been lost and his belongings destroyed, and that their lawyer had not been allowed to see him at the jail because of COVID-19 restrictions.

Failure to Intervene

Pamela Foster sued on December 6, 2023, the second anniversary of her husband’s death, individually and as personal representative of his estate, in the federal court for the Northern District of Alabama. DiCello Levitt brought the case with Crump’s firm, and Eli Hare, senior counsel in DiCello Levitt’s Birmingham office, said the former player and father of four had been “brutally killed.” Outside the courthouse, Foster’s mother, Sabrina Foster, said, “My son didn’t have to die, and just like too many of us, we are being murdered.” His father, Glenn Foster Sr., said, “It is definitely not sweet to people of color in this state.”

The suit named Sheriff Hall, Lieutenant Deputy Drew Wilburn, Deputy Young, Administrator White, and corrections officers Willie Brown, LaDon Hill, DeMarco Easterwood and Derrick Richardson. It also described two earlier encounters between Pickens County deputies and Black men struggling with mental illness: a fatal shooting during a wellness check in 2019, and a death in custody four months before Foster’s. The officers moved to dismiss and invoked qualified immunity, which bars a damages suit against an official unless the conduct alleged violated a constitutional right that was clearly established at the time.

On December 5, 2024, U.S. District Judge Annemarie Carney Axon refused to extend that immunity to Young, Hill and White on the claim of excessive force. Decisions of the Eleventh Circuit, she explained, had clearly established that officers may not use force on a restrained detainee who is neither resisting nor threatening anyone, and the estate described that conduct twice: a man held in a chair on December 5, and a man bound at the wrists, ankles and waist on December 6. “The Estate has therefore alleged a violation of either Mr. Foster’s Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment rights,” she wrote.

The second claim was about the officers who stood by. An officer who watches another officer violate a person’s constitutional rights has a clearly established duty to intervene, and the estate alleged that each officer at the transport vehicle could have physically stopped White, told him to stop, or reported him to a supervisor. “Instead, they did nothing,” Judge Axon wrote. She allowed the failure-to-intervene claim to proceed against Hall, Wilburn, Young and the four corrections officers for December 6, and against Young and Hill, each for failing to stop the other, for the night in the chair on December 5. Supervisory claims against Hall, Wilburn, Young and White went forward as well.

“Mr. Foster’s death was barbaric,” DiCello Levitt partner Ken Abbarno said that day. “He was stripped naked, tased repeatedly, choked to the point of unconsciousness, and denied access to medical treatment.” Abbarno represents Foster’s family alongside Debrosse and Crump.

The ruling came a day before the third anniversary of Foster’s death. Debrosse marked it in those terms: “Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of Mr. Foster’s senseless death in police custody. With today’s decision, we continue to honor his memory by fighting vigorously for justice—for him and his family.”

Two months later, on February 9, 2025, hours before the Super Bowl kicked off at the Caesars Superdome, Foster’s family stood on Poydras Street, about a mile from the stadium, and chanted his name. Pamela Foster said, “He was their hero, he was our provider. He was a fantastic father, great husband, and perfect man.” Sabrina Foster asked the Saints and the league to say more: “Glenn worked for the NFL as a Saints player, and we need them to honor him.” Pickens County remains a defendant. The claims that survived — that officers used excessive force against Foster and that others who were present failed to stop it — are the ones a jury in the Northern District of Alabama will eventually have to weigh.

Co-Lead Counsel Against Abbott and Mead Johnson

On May 27, 2022, Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer of the Northern District of Illinois appointed five lawyers as plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel in In re Abbott Laboratories, et al., Preterm Infant Nutrition Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3026: Timothy J. Becker, C. Andrew Childers, Wendy R. Fleishman, Jose M. Rojas, and Debrosse. The litigation then held more than sixty state and federal lawsuits, each brought by parents whose premature babies had been fed Abbott’s Similac or Mead Johnson’s Enfamil in the hospital and had developed necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC).

Necrotizing enterocolitis destroys intestinal tissue, often forcing emergency bowel surgery on infants already fighting to survive in the NICU, and many do not survive it; its death rate is estimated at more than twenty percent. The products at issue were cow’s-milk-based formulas and fortifiers for mothers’ milk, made for use in hospital neonatal units.

Debrosse stated the families’ case on the day of her appointment. She said: “Abbott and Mead Johnson have long been aware of the scientific evidence that their formulas greatly increased the risk of NEC in premature infants, yet they failed to take the most basic actions that could have saved many young lives. It is these infants and their families for whom my co-lead counsel and I are committed to achieving justice.” She called the companies’ conduct “what can only be described as gross negligence.”

In the same statement she noted a first. “Judge Pallmeyer is the first judge to ever appoint a black woman as plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel in an MDL,” she said. “People of color are still underrepresented in the legal profession overall, and especially in first-tier litigation leadership positions. My hope and expectation is that this is only the beginning of a trend for attorneys of color.” With Crump she had co-founded Shades of Mass, an organization that works to get Black and Brown lawyers named to the leadership committees that run mass tort litigation, seats from which they have historically been mostly absent.

Two Juries, Four Months Apart

By March 2024 more than four hundred complaints were pending on Judge Pallmeyer’s docket, and the first jury to decide an NEC case sat in state court, in St. Clair County, Illinois. Jasmine Watson’s son, Chance Dean, had been born at 31 weeks, was fed Enfamil in the neonatal intensive care unit, and developed necrotizing enterocolitis within days; he did not survive it. The trial lasted a month. Over four weeks, Watson’s lawyers put decades of research before the jury — studies linking cow’s-milk-based formula to a sharply elevated risk of NEC in premature infants, and internal knowledge Mead Johnson had not passed on to parents or their doctors. The jury took two hours to decide what Mead Johnson owed Watson for the death of her son and awarded her $60 million, $25 million more than her lawyers had asked for — the first verdict returned anywhere in the country in the litigation over infant formula and NEC. Mead Johnson said afterward that it was weighing an appeal.

Four months later, in July 2024, a Missouri jury in St. Louis returned the first verdict against Abbott Laboratories over Similac and NEC. The case had been brought by Margo Gill, an Illinois mother whose daughter was born prematurely in August 2021, at twenty-six weeks’ gestation. In the hospital the baby was fed human milk at first and then, while she weighed less than 1,500 grams, Similac Special Care 24 High Protein, a cow’s-milk-based formula. Within days she developed NEC. She needed a series of surgeries, lost about three-quarters of her intestine, and was left with brain damage, cerebral palsy and seizures; she cannot eat normally and will need care around the clock for the rest of her life.

Abbott’s central defense was the learned-intermediary doctrine, under which a maker of prescription drugs or medical devices meets its duty to warn by warning the physician; Abbott argued that the neonatologists, not the parents, were the people it had to warn. The St. Louis court rejected that argument before trial, because preterm formula is neither a prescription drug nor a medical device. At trial Gill’s lawyers put the studies linking cow’s-milk formula to NEC in very-low-birth-weight infants before the jury, argued that Abbott knew or should have known of the danger to babies under 1,500 grams, and showed jurors proposed warning language that named NEC. The formula’s labeling recommended human milk and advised following a physician’s instructions, but it did not warn specifically of NEC. On July 26, after a three-week trial, the jury ordered Abbott to pay $95 million in compensatory damages and added $400 million in punitive damages — $495 million in total, the second baby-formula verdict of the year and the first against Abbott specifically. Abbott announced it would appeal.

The two verdicts had arrived four months apart, from different juries in different states, against the two companies that dominate the American formula market, and both juries had concluded the same thing: that the manufacturers knew about the NEC risk to premature infants and had not warned the people feeding it to them. Judge Pallmeyer’s own MDL, still building its bellwether cases toward trial, now had two state-court verdicts showing what a jury does with that evidence.

The Settlement, Two Years Later

On September 12, 2024, Judge Pallmeyer set the order for the first four bellwether trials inside her own MDL, cases the parties had selected and litigated through discovery because they were representative of the broader docket. Ericka Mar of Kentucky, whose daughter RaiLee died of NEC at 15 days old after being fed Similac, would go first against Abbott. Keosha Diggs of Maryland, whose son needed lifesaving surgery after being fed both Similac and Enfamil, would sue both companies. Rebekah Etienne and Deondrick Brown Sr. would bring a wrongful-death claim over their son, Deondrick W. Brown Jr., who died of NEC in September 2021 after both products. Alexis Inman would sue Mead Johnson alone over her child’s death. Specific trial dates would be set at a later status conference, with each case spaced roughly twelve weeks apart.

In March 2026, Debrosse and her partners Adam Levitt and Mark DiCello argued in Law360 that relying on the federal MDL by default is not necessarily sound strategy for plaintiffs. An MDL, they wrote, takes in cases easily and lets few of them out, puts tens of thousands of claims on one judge’s calendar, and erodes plaintiffs’ leverage when settlement talks proceed without a credible prospect of repeated trials. “Trial pressure comes from a credible expectation that cases will be tried repeatedly, in meaningful numbers, before different juries, under different state laws, with verdicts that defendants cannot easily cabin or discount,” they wrote. “State courts aren’t a sideshow to the federal MDL system.”

A Missouri appeals court upheld the Gill verdict on May 5, 2026. Abbott then appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, but on August 18, 2026, the parties jointly moved to vacate the judgment and send the case back to the trial court to finalize a settlement; two days later, Abbott agreed to resolve the Gill case along with roughly 2,000 other NEC claims for a combined $670 million, which the company said cost less than continuing to litigate or paying the Gill judgment with interest, a sum it put at about $600 million. The settlement did not close the litigation. Roughly 1,700 lawsuits covering about 12,700 infants remained pending against Abbott and Mead Johnson afterward, more than 825 of them consolidated in Judge Pallmeyer’s court in Chicago and others in state courts in Illinois, Missouri and Pennsylvania. In Chicago, the first federal bellwether trial — Alexis Inman’s claim against Mead Johnson — was already underway.

Debrosse’s title in that court is co-lead counsel, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers who decide how the MDL’s shared discovery, expert proof, and trial strategy get built — a docket that grew from a few hundred complaints in 2022 to the thousands of families still waiting when Abbott settled. She holds the same kind of leadership seat in several of her firm’s other nationwide product cases.

Lead Counsel Before the MDLs

Debrosse built that career out of Alabama, not Chicago or New York. A graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Law and City College of New York, where she finished summa cum laude, she is admitted to practice in Alabama, New York, and the District of Columbia, and has recovered more than $1 billion in damages for clients over her career. She once represented dozens of cities and counties in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi against opioid manufacturers and distributors. Her earlier lead-counsel work includes CPC Reference Laboratories v. LabCorp and Family Medicine Pharmacy v. Impax Laboratories, and she held leadership seats in the Higher One account-marketing litigation and the Smith & Nephew Birmingham Hip Resurfacing implant MDL before the infant-formula and hair-relaxer MDLs put her name on national dockets.

She came to DiCello Levitt from Grant & Eisenhofer in June 2021, with Eli Hare joining from the same firm, to lead its new Birmingham office, which she now runs as managing partner. She also co-chairs two of the firm’s practice groups at once: Mass Torts, where the infant-formula litigation sits, and Civil and Human Rights Litigation, where she represents Alabama families against police officers and county governments directly, as their own lawyer rather than one name among an MDL’s shared leadership. One of those cases is Anny Pamela Foster’s wrongful-death suit against Pickens County over the death of Glenn Foster Jr.

In early 2022, before the formula appointment, she was named to the plaintiffs’ executive committee in the Paraquat MDL. Her docket now also includes the GLP-1 receptor-agonist MDL, where she co-chairs trial strategy for the plaintiffs’ executive committee; the social-media adolescent-addiction MDL, where she sits on the plaintiffs’ steering committee; the City of Baltimore’s claims over the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge; and a suit for San Francisco and the People of California against the makers of ultra-processed foods, the first case of its kind brought by a public entity.

She sits on the boards of Public Justice and the Southern Trial Lawyers Association, has served on the Alabama State Bar’s Board of Bar Commissioners and as president of the Magic City Bar Association, is fluent in French and Haitian Creole and proficient in Spanish, and has two daughters.

Jenny Mitchell and the Hair-Relaxer Cases

In October 2022, Debrosse and Crump filed suit in Illinois for Jenny Mitchell against L’Oréal USA and four other makers of chemical hair straighteners. Mitchell, then thirty-two, had started using relaxers in 2000, around the third grade, and used them about every four weeks after that. Nearly two decades later, with no family history of the disease, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer and had a full hysterectomy. “Not being able to carry my own children has been the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to deal with,” she said. The suit followed by about a week a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, drawn from roughly 34,000 women in the NIH-funded Sister Study, which found that women who frequently used chemical straighteners were more than twice as likely to develop uterine cancer as women who did not.

Other suits followed. In February 2023 the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation gathered cases from nineteen districts before the federal court in Chicago, and on March 2, 2023, Judge Mary M. Rowland appointed four co-lead counsel from the bench: Debrosse, Crump, Fidelma Fitzpatrick of Motley Rice, and Michael A. London of Douglas & London. Debrosse called the day “an important milestone in our commitment to achieve justice for all women who were assured that these products were safe, and particularly Black women who were primarily targeted as customers.” In November 2023 the court allowed many of the claims against the companies to go forward, and by January 2024 the MDL held the claims of more than 8,000 women. The companies, L’Oréal USA among them, deny that the claims have merit.

By then calls about the American cases were reaching Debrosse from South Africa, where, she said, relaxers contain “similar buckets of chemicals,” and she said she was willing to talk with lawyers there. A relaxer, she pointed out, is applied directly to the scalp and left on for a while. “We knew [this matter] impacted women of African descent around the world,” she said.