The $39.5 Million Awarded to Crane Operator Donald Leo's Family in the 91st Street Crane Collapse Trial Against James Lomma, Won After an Eleven Month Trial and Then Reduced to $16 Million by the First Department in 2017

Donald Christopher Leo was 30 years old, a crane operator from Staten Island and the son of a crane operator, working the cab of a 205 foot Kodiak tower crane at a high rise site at 331-333 East 91st Street in Manhattan. On the morning of May 30, 2008 he was lowering a line to pick up a basket of electricians' tools when the crane began to tip backward. The turntable assembly failed, and the cab, boom, and counterweights sheared off the tower. Witnesses in the apartment building across the street saw Leo's face as the crane teetered, saw him put his hands together as if praying, then brace his palms against the glass as the cab fell 200 feet, struck the building, and bounced off terraces to the ground. His father saw him in the rubble with his eyes open. An EMS technician found him alive and conscious seven minutes after the collapse; he died minutes later. Ramadan Kurtaj, a 27 year old construction worker below, was crushed and died about four hours later at the hospital.

The trial that followed turned on the crane's turntable bearing ring. When the original cracked in 2007, the manufacturer quoted James Lomma, whose New York Crane & Equipment Corp. owned the crane, $120,127 to expedite a proper replacement. Lomma instead bought one for $20,000 from RTR Bearing Company, a Chinese broker his mechanic found through a Google search. RTR emailed that it did not have confidence in its own welding for so critical a part; Lomma let it weld the ring anyway, and when no engineer would certify the replacement for the Department of Buildings, Lomma certified it himself. His defense tried to pin the collapse on Leo's operation of the crane, but the evidence showed every safety device tested and working that morning, and the jury found the weld failed and the turntable tore apart. Lomma had been acquitted of manslaughter in 2012, leaving the civil case as the only public reckoning.

Bernadette Panzella of Bernadette Panzella, P.C. was trial counsel for Leo's mother, Maria Leo, the administrator of his estate, through a first trial that ended in a May 2014 mistrial when Lomma was hurt in a car accident during jury selection, and then through a retrial before Justice Manuel Mendez that ran about eleven months with more than 87 witnesses, widely described as the longest civil trial in Manhattan Supreme Court history. Plaintiffs subpoenaed Lomma himself, and Panzella later pointed to his roughly twelve days on the witness stand as what sank him: the jury found his conduct reckless and wanton, pierced the corporate veils of his companies, and held him personally liable. On July 30, 2015 it awarded $47.8 million in compensatory damages, about $15.8 million of it to Leo's family, and on August 3, 2015 it added $24 million in punitive damages for each family, $48 million in all, bringing the combined verdicts to roughly $96 million. Against the Lomma defendants, the Leo awards were $7.5 million for preimpact terror, $8 million for conscious pain and suffering, and the $24 million punitive award: $39.5 million. The Kurtaj family, represented by Susan Karten, was awarded $55.5 million in the same categories.

The appeal took most of it back, and that belongs in this record too. On September 12, 2017 the First Department upheld the liability findings in full, including the veil piercing and the punitive award, and its opinion describes in detail both Lomma's conduct and the terror Leo endured in the falling cab. But it held the amounts materially deviated from reasonable compensation and ordered a new damages trial unless the families accepted reduced sums: for Leo, $2.5 million for preimpact terror, $5.5 million for pain and suffering, and $8 million in punitive damages, $16 million in total; for the Kurtaj estate, $19 million. The combined awards dropped from roughly $96 million to about $35 million. On the appeal itself Maria Leo appeared through Locke Lord LLP, with Panzella's firm also appearing in the case, and the trial record remains Panzella's: two juries empaneled, eleven months of proof, and a final appellate holding that the man who put a bargain Chinese weld under a 205 foot crane deserved to pay punitive damages for what happened to Donald Leo.