The family of Christian Andreacchio has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the two individuals who were with him the day he was found dead in his Meridian apartment.
Andreacchio died in February 2014, and law enforcement officials are still investigating what happened. The death was initially and prematurely ruled a suicide, then the case was reopened and turned over to the Attorney General’s office by District Attorney Bilbo Mitchell’s office earlier this year.
“While the Defendants were present, the Deceased was shot and killed. Rather than report the death to law enforcement, the Defendants traveled to a bank and attempted to withdraw money from the Decedent’s bank account,” the lawsuit states. “As such, the Defendants, jointly and severally, failed to act reasonably as a reasonable person should do, by either notifying emergency medical respondents, law enforcement, or providing first aid themselves.”
The defendants in the lawsuit are Whitley Goodman and Dylan Swearingen, Andreacchio’s former girlfriend and friend. Arrest warrants for both Swearingen and Goodman were issued at the beginning of the year, but police made no arrests before the case was handed off to the Attorney General’s office.
A call to Meridian attorney J. Stewart Parrish, who represented both Goodman and Swearingen in the past, was not immediately returned Wednesday.
The lawsuit is filed in Lauderdale County Circuit Court.
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Family files wrongful death lawsuit in unsolved Meridian case
Kate Royals is a Jackson native and returned to Mississippi Today as the lead education reporter after serving in the same capacity from 2016 to 2018. Prior to that, she was a reporter for the Clarion-Ledger covering education and state government. She won awards for her investigative work, including stories about the state’s campaign finance laws and prison system. She was a news producer at MassLive in Springfield, Mass., after graduating from Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communications with a master’s degree in communications.
