Panera Bread reaches settlement in wrongful death lawsuit filed by family of former Penn student

By Liz Crawford

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    PHILADELPHIA (KYW) — Panera Bread reached a settlement in the wrongful death lawsuit involving former Penn student, Sarah Katz.

The attorney representing Katz’s family told CBS News Philadelphia the matter has been resolved and she could not provide any other details.

Earlier this year, Katz’s parents talked with CBS News Philadelphia in an exclusive interview.

Katz’s parents, Jill and Michael, said their 21-year-old daughter avoided energy drinks because she had a heart condition, called Long QT syndrome, which disrupts the heart’s electrical activity.

Two years ago, Sarah Katz bought a Charged Lemonade drink from a Philadelphia Panera Bread and hours later she went into cardiac arrest and died. The parents said their daughter had no idea there was caffeine in the drink.

The Katzes previously told CBS News Philadelphia they had got a phone call that their daughter collapsed at a restaurant and rushed from their home in Jersey City and drove straight to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center.

The parents said when they arrived, medical staff was trying to resuscitate Sarah Katz, but they were unable to save her.

In addition to the excruciating and shocking loss of their daughter, Jill and Michael Katz had no answers as to what caused their daughter to have cardiac arrest and die.

It wasn’t until a few months later when they drove back to Philadelphia to clean out her apartment that they learned a new piece of information from her roommate who had started piecing together clues after her death.

“She says, ‘I think I know what happened to Sarah,’ and I wasn’t sure, you know, to talk to you about it or not,” Jill Katz said of the conversation with her daughter’s former roommate. “But, you know, that she started recently drinking these Panera Charged Lemonades and she knew that Sarah stayed away from energy drinks, and there’s a big one in the apartment.”

The Katzes determined Sarah Katz had purchased and drank a Charged Lemonade from the Panera on South 40th Street in Philadelphia.

The parents told CBS News Philadelphia their daughter never would have had Panera Bread’s Charged Lemonade if she had known what was in it.

Since her death, other lawsuits have been filed over the Charged Lemonade drink.

Panera Bread has since removed charged lemonades from their menu.

CBS News Philadelphia has reached out to Panera Bread for comment and is waiting to hear back.

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