Soldier’s Family Sues Hilton for Drunken Death by Air Conditioner

The family of Army Spc. Robert Hornbeck, 23, launched a search for their missing on last spring when he never returned from a late night of bar-hopping with a fellow soldier. Just after 3:00 a.m. on April 16, Hornbeck’s father arrived at the DeSoto Hilton in Savannah, GA, to give him a ride. Not seeing his son, Hornbeck dialed him on his cell phone. When Robert Hornbeck answered, he said, "Dad, I’m on the stairs," and then the connection went dead.

Hornbeck, of Lapeer, MI, had returned to Fort Benning in January after spending a year in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division. He was in Savannah to spend the Easter weekend with his father and stepmother, and was planning to leave the Army at the end of the month. He and his college sweetheart had planned to be married in July, and afterward he was going to return to the University of Michigan where he had been studying psychology before joining the Army in 2004.

Family members and friends spent nearly two weeks looking throughout the historic district of Savannah, where the Hilton is located. They took out a full-page ad in the local paper, posted fliers in store windows with Robert’s photo, and offered a $10,000 reward for information about his disappearance.

Twelve days after Hornbeck went missing, hotel guests began complaining about a foul odor in the lobby of the hotel. A maintenance worker searching for the source of the smell discovered Hornbeck’s body inside an industrial-sized air conditioner accessibly only through a maintenance door. An autopsy determined that he had been struck by a large, spinning blower wheel inside the room-sized air conditioner unit. The autopsy also showed that Hornbeck’s blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit for driving a car.

Hornbeck was not a guest at the Hilton, and police never figured out how he got into the hotel’s maintenance area or what he was doing there. Investigators believe that he ended up in the air conditioner after breaking into the maintenance area, climbing a stairwell, and then opening a service panel door to get into the blower unit.

During the investigation, both Hornbeck’s father and his uncle said that they suspected Robert was intoxicated when the accident happened. "I think maybe he’d in fact had too much to drink," said his uncle, Kirk Hornbeck. "He might’ve thought he was going out the right door to the outside and got turned around inside the building and ended up in the wrong spot."

Now Hornbeck’s family has filed suit against the Hilton in state court, claiming that the hotel is responsible for their son’s death. According to the lawsuit, "The defendant had a duty to maintain a safe area in its hotel, and to place appropriate warning signs and maintain locks on doors that led to its electric and air conditioning units." The family is seeking $10 million in damages. A spokesman for the hotel declined to comment.