Sea Girt Carpenter Rendered Quadriplegic in Rooftop Fall Receives $4 Million Settlement
Won by Ginarte Gonzalez & Winograd, LLP.
After falling from a Sea Girt rooftop without a safety harness on May 4, 2017, and sustaining a complete cervical spinal cord injury that left him permanently quadriplegic, Roberto Carlos Bolanos settled his negligence claim against the general contractor for $4 million.
What happened
Roberto Carlos Bolanos was 37 years old and employed as a carpenter by Eastern Architectural Millwork, a subcontractor brought onto a residential renovation by general contractor Kevin Casey Builders. On May 4, 2017, Bolanos was working at the project in Sea Girt, New Jersey. He climbed onto the rooftop of the home and fell to the ground. He was not wearing a safety harness at the time of the fall. Harnesses were sometimes present on the site, but they were frequently not fastened.
The fall fractured Bolanos's cervical spine and caused a complete spinal cord injury that left him permanently quadriplegic. After emergency surgery, he spent eight days in the hospital and then seven months in rehabilitation. By the time the case settled, Bolanos was residing in an assisted living facility.
John Ratkowitz and Michael Gallardo, both attorneys at the Newark office of Ginarte, Gallardo, Gonzalez and Winograd, filed a negligence claim against Kevin Casey Builders. New Jersey imposes a non-delegable safety duty on general contractors at construction sites. The firm's theory was that Kevin Casey Builders could not transfer responsibility for fall protection to the subcontractor; the general contractor was obligated to ensure every worker on the project was equipped and in compliance.
Discovery produced significant admissions. Kevin Casey Builders personnel confirmed that workers had been found without harnesses on multiple occasions at the Sea Girt site and had to be corrected. Evidence also showed that on the day of the accident, the site may not have had enough anchored safety lines available to outfit every worker present. The combination of missing compliance and insufficient anchor points formed the factual core of the case.
The matter settled without trial. After a series of conferences before Monmouth County Superior Court Judge Andrea Marshall, the parties reached an agreement on August 26, 2022. Kevin Casey Builders' commercial general liability carrier, Selective Insurance Co., paid $4 million to resolve the claim.
TopVerdict ranked Bolanos v. Kevin Casey Builders among the top ten personal injury settlements in New Jersey for 2022.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Ginarte Gonzalez & Winograd, LLP
All Ginarte Gonzalez & Winograd, LLP proven verdicts →When improperly installed scaffolding collapsed at a Bordentown, New Jersey construction site and injured four workers, John Ratkowitz of Ginarte Gonzalez and Winograd secured a $19.675 million multi-party settlement that awarded $15 million to Luis Yanza, who sustained a traumatic brain injury leaving him with permanent, severe cognitive deficits.
A federal jury in the Southern District of New York awarded $8.67 million to Daniel Rivera, a construction worker who suffered permanent loss of use of his left arm and vision loss after an unsecured metal ladder at a Yonkers job site contacted a live electrical wire in August 2015.
Jose Criollo, 46, fell from an unguarded scaffolding tower after airborne debris struck his eyes, sustaining a complete spinal cord injury at T12-T13 that left him permanently paraplegic; the case settled for $8.225 million against the general contractor and his employer combined.
James Jordan, a 42-year-old longshoreman, was hurt in June 2012 when a section of deck on the MV Ever Decent gave way at the Port of Elizabeth. He herniated a disc at L5-S1 and needed a laminectomy and fusion. After eight days of trial in Hudson County, the vessel owner's insurer settled the case for $2.8 million in March 2015.
Related workplace injury verdicts
After nearly 30 years of litigation, Markovits Stock and DeMarco secured a $742 million-plus-interest settlement for approximately 23,000 Navistar retirees whose healthcare and life insurance benefits had been repeatedly reduced.
Paul Napoli served as court-appointed co-liaison counsel for nearly 10,000 firefighters, police officers, and construction workers who developed respiratory diseases after working at Ground Zero, securing a settlement worth up to $712.5 million against the city and its contractors.
Jose Valdivia, 25, was building scaffolding at the Phillips 66 refinery in Lake Charles when a co-worker above him lost his grip on a steel scaffold bar. It struck him on the head and spine through a hard hat and full protective equipment. He is in a wheelchair with limited speech. Brock never reported the accident to OSHA.
On September 7, 2019, Ulysses Cruz, a 48-year-old United Airlines ramp worker serving as a wing walker at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, was struck from behind by an Allied Aviation Fueling Company of Houston van whose driver said the morning sun was in his eyes. Cruz was paralyzed from the chest down and suffered a stroke two days later that cost him the use of his dominant right arm. After a two-week trial before Judge Ravi Sandill, a Harris County jury on October 25, 2021 found Allied 70 percent and driver Reginald Willis 30 percent at fault and awarded Cruz, his wife and their two children $352.7 million in compensatory damages. Judge Sandill conditioned denial of a new trial on a $117.5 million remittitur of noneconomic damages, which the family accepted, and an amended judgment of about $235.3 million was signed February 7, 2022. Allied appealed, the parties reached a confidential mediated settlement, and on July 18, 2023 the First Court of Appeals vacated the judgment and dismissed the case at the parties' joint request.