Jury Awards $7 Million to 87-Year-Old Retirement Community Resident Hurt in Laundry Room Fall
After trial: We found no post-trial motion or appeal, but the court docket could not be accessed, so the case's current status is unconfirmed. Whether the verdict has been paid is not public.
An 87-year-old retirement community resident slipped on water from a backed-up laundry room drain and fractured her leg, needing multiple surgeries and rehabilitation. A Los Angeles Superior Court jury in Pomona found the property owners liable and returned a $7 million verdict. The owners argued they had no notice because staff snaked the drain after each reported backup. The building was demolished before the plumbing could be inspected.
What happened
An 87-year-old woman living in a retirement community in Los Angeles County went into her laundry room one day and stepped into water. A drain in the room had backed up and left the floor wet. She slipped and fell, and the fall broke her leg badly enough to need immediate medical treatment.
The fracture led to multiple surgeries and a long course of rehabilitation. Months later she fell a second time. Her legal team tied that second fall to the weakness left by the first injury, and she ended up dependent on a wheelchair and on help from others with basic daily tasks.
The case went to trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, in the Pomona courthouse (Case No. 25PSCV00692), against the owners of the property. Shane Hapuarachy and Greta Curry of Jacoby & Meyers represented the plaintiff, and Alex Giovanniello of Giovanniello Law Group defended.
The central dispute was notice, meaning what the owners knew about the drain before the fall. The owners argued they had no warning of a dangerous condition, and that each time a drain backup was reported, maintenance staff responded by snaking the line, which they called a reasonable fix. The plaintiff's side pointed to the repeated backups as evidence of a larger plumbing problem that was never permanently resolved, so the owners knew or should have known the floor could flood again.
Evidence was limited in one respect. The building was demolished before the plaintiff's lawyers could inspect the plumbing, which left little physical evidence of the drain's condition and made the case turn on the maintenance history and the testimony about it. The jury had to decide whether a pattern of repeated backups, each handled with a quick clearing of the line, amounted to notice of a hazard that residents could reasonably expect to be fixed for good.
After hearing the evidence, the jury found for the plaintiff and returned a verdict of $7 million. The public sources do not break the award into medical costs, pain and suffering or other categories, and they do not give the verdict date. We could not find a post-trial motion or appeal, though the court docket was not accessible to confirm the case's current status.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
Related slip & fall verdicts
A Cook County jury awarded $32 million to truck driver Stephanie Johnson, who developed Complex Regional Pain Syndrome after slipping on oil at an ExxonMobil facility, in what the Jury Verdict Reporter recorded as the largest CRPS verdict in Illinois history.
After a neurosurgeon slipped on a wet hospital pantry floor and developed reflex sympathetic dystrophy that ended his surgical career, an Evansville jury found St. Mary's Medical Center fully at fault and awarded $16.95 million, a verdict the Indiana Court of Appeals later affirmed.
A Kern County jury awarded William Kidd and his wife Elaine $16.2 million after he slipped at a Bakersfield El Pollo Loco and suffered a brain injury that later required surgery.
A Clark County jury held Lowe's responsible after Kelly Hendrickson slipped on liquid draining from store planters, fractured her skull, and permanently lost her senses of taste and smell.