$15 Million Verdict After a Retaining Wall Collapsed and Buried a 74-Year-Old Woman at Her Senior Living Campus

Judith Cisewski was 74 and living at the Lincoln Village senior living campus in Port Washington, Wisconsin, when a retaining wall on the property gave way on May 17, 2020. The wall came down on top of her, burying her under its concrete blocks. It took approximately two hours to free her. Police officers were the ones who eventually extricated her from the collapsed structure. Cisewski died the next day.

Her estate sued two defendants over the wall. Oberndorfer Land Care had built it. Lincoln Village Senior Living owned and operated the campus where residents like Cisewski lived and walked past it every day. The estate's theory against each defendant was different in kind. Against Oberndorfer, the claim was that the wall itself had been built wrong, constructed in a way that made its eventual failure foreseeable rather than freakish. Against Lincoln Village, the claim was about what came after construction: a facility has an ongoing duty to maintain the safety of the property where it houses residents, many of whom are elderly and walk the grounds daily, and the estate argued Lincoln Village had not met that duty for a structure with a known and growing risk of collapse.

Al Foeckler of Cannon & Dunphy S.C. represented the estate at trial. The case was, at its core, an argument about who is responsible when a piece of built infrastructure that residents rely on as safe turns out not to be, and whether responsibility sits only with the company that poured the concrete or extends to the company that operated the property around it for years afterward.

The jury did not split narrowly between one theory and the other. After deliberating for four hours, it found both defendants liable, apportioning 60 percent of the fault to Oberndorfer Land Care for the construction of the wall and 40 percent to Lincoln Village Senior Living for failing to maintain and preserve safety on the premises. On October 30, 2025, the jury returned a verdict of $15 million.

Because this was a premises liability claim rather than a medical malpractice or ordinary personal injury claim, Wisconsin's statutory damages caps, which apply to specific categories of claims such as medical malpractice noneconomic damages, do not reach it. There is no statutory ceiling here for a court to apply against the jury's figure the way one applies in a capped case, which means the $15 million verdict is not subject to the kind of automatic reduction that shows up in some other case types.

Reporting following the verdict noted that Lincoln Village and its attorneys had not responded to requests for comment, and no appeal has been publicly reported. The $15 million stands as the jury's verdict.