On May 23, 2001, Amy Marie Fledderman, an 18-year-old freshman at Penn State, underwent liposuction in the King of Prussia office of Dr. Richard P. Glunk. The plastic surgeon told the teenager he would remove excess fat from her neck and abdomen, and that she would be as safe as if the elective procedure was done in a hospital. Instead, Dr. Glunk nicked a blood vessel in Amy Fledderman's neck. She died two days later of a fat embolism, at Montgomery Hospital in Norristown.

On May 23, 2008, exactly seven years after Amy Fledderman's fatal liposuction, a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury returned a $20.5 million verdict against Dr. Glunk, and Edward DeStefano, a nurse anesthetist. The jury award included $15 million in punitive damages against Dr. Glunk, $3.5 million for what the 18-year-old would have earned in her lifetime, and $2 million for emotional distress inflicted upon Colleen Fledderman, Amy’s mother. Colleen Fledderman testified during the five-week trial that for more than two hours after her daughter's procedure, she had begged and pleaded with the doctor to call an ambulance for her daughter, to no avail.

"Amy was suffering all afternoon," Fledderman’s lawyer, Slade H. McLaughlin of The Beasley Firm, told Lu Ann Cahn of NBC 10 News in an interview after the trial. "She should have been in a hospital, but Dr. Glunk never got her there. I think he panicked."