SPRINGFIELD — After ruling a wrongful-death claim was too late, an appellate court’s divided opinion earlier this year ended with a prediction.

“We are well aware that this decision creates a split in the districts and, therefore, we anticipate at some point hearing from the [S]upreme [C]ourt on the issue,” wrote 3rd District Appellate Justice Daniel L. Schmidt.

That prediction was borne out this week when the state’s top court granted an appeal in the case, Moon v. Rhode, No. 119572.

In the appeal, the court will look into whether a two-year deadline for filing wrongful-death suits starts to toll after a death or once the plaintiff finds out about the actions allegedly leading to death.

Randall W. Moon, a Pennsylvania lawyer, was appointed executor for the estate of his mother, Kathryn, after she died in May 2009. About a year later, in March 2010, he obtained her medical records from an extended hospital stay that immediately preceded her death.

But in February 2013, he had another doctor review computed tomography, or CT, scans from her hospital stay.

That doctor told him the radiologist who initially reviewed the scans had missed a problem with her intestines, and the mistake likely contributed to her death.

Less than a month later, in March 2013, Moon filed wrongful-death and survival claims against the radiologist, Clarissa Rhode, and her employer, Central Illinois Radiological Associates Ltd. He argued he did not know about the negligence until the outside doctor reviewed the scan.

The defendants filed a Section 2-619 motion to dismiss, arguing the plaintiff’s suit was not timely filed because the statute of limitations for both wrongful-death and survival claims is two years.

Peoria County Circuit Judge Richard D. McCoy granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss, saying Kathryn’s death was the “date from which the two-year statute should be measured.”

In an eight-page opinion earlier this year, a divided 3rd District Appellate Court affirmed that decision.

Section 2 of the state’s Wrongful Death Act says “[e]very such action shall be commenced within two years after the death of such person.”

Moon cited two cases, Wells v. Travis from 1996, and Young v. McKiegue from 1999, for support.

Both courts in those cases cited Section 13-212(a) of the Code of Civil Procedure, which discusses a two-year time limit for malpractice suits and ruled that time-limit starts for wrongful-death actions that deal with alleged malpractice that wasn’t initially apparent.

That principle is called the “discovery rule,” and courts in Illinois have allowed it in similar cases throughout the years.

But the majority in this case, with an opinion authored by Schmidt, said those cases were based on faulty logic — that they read language into the law that simply isn’t there.

Section 13-212(a) says no action against a doctor can be brought more than two years after a claimant “knew, or through the use of reasonable diligence should have known, or received notice in writing of the existence of the injury or death.”

The majority ruled there is no language there giving potential claimants the ability to file suits for up to two years after they discover negligent conduct.

“The required knowledge is of the death or injury, not of the negligent conduct. If the General Assembly wanted to provide a limitations period in the act commencing when one had knowledge of the negligent conduct, it would have done so,” Schmidt wrote.

He acknowledged that some courts allowed the deadline to begin tolling later — in cases where the circumstances surrounding the alleged wrongful death required a time-extension.

For instance, in Praznik v. Sport Aero in 1976, a court ruled the time limit in an airplane crash did not start until the wreckage was discovered two years and eight months after the plane went down. But Schmidt wrote that type of extension should be used “sparingly and with caution.”

But for the most part, he wrote, “[w]e have looked everywhere possible in Section 13-212(a) and nowhere can we find the language that the dissent would have us read into the statute to the effect that the statute begins running “when plaintiff discovered the fact of the defendant’s negligence which contributed to the death.”

Schmidt, joined by Justice Mary W. McDade, concluded by noting their decision had overturned previous appellate precedents.

“We are well aware that this decision creates a split in the districts and, therefore, we anticipate at some point hearing from the [S]upreme [C]ourt on the issue,” the majority wrote. “However, until that time, we follow the [S]upreme [C]ourt and ‘will not read into a statute language which is clearly not there.’”

In a four-page dissent, Justice Tom M. Lytton wrote that the majority’s decision “conflicts with over 30 years of precedent,” including from the Supreme Court itself, in dicta.

In the 1989 case Wyness v. Armstrong World Industries Inc., the high court explicitly approved the appellate courts’ practice of applying the “discovery rule” to wrongful-death cases when it wrote “the delay of the running of the limitation period accepted by the appellate court in some districts assures that a wrongful-death action may be filed after death when plaintiffs finally know or reasonably should know of the wrongfully caused injury which led to death.”

Lytton wrote that because of “the foregoing well-settled case law,” he would’ve reversed the trial court’s decision.

Nicholas J. Bertschy, of Heyl, Royster, Voelker & Allen P.C. in Peoria, represented Rhode. He declined to comment on the case.

Michael T. Reagan, of the Law Offices of Michael T. Reagan in Ottawa, represented Moon. He could not be reached for comment.