$1 Million Settlement After Three-Year-Old Found Hanging at Lancaster County Daycare
Won by Kenneth Berger.
A three-year-old boy was found unconscious and hanging from a jump rope at a Lancaster, South Carolina daycare in September 2013, suffering a traumatic brain injury from oxygen deprivation; his family recovered a $1 million settlement in 2016.
What happened
In September 2013, a teacher at Burbee Place Daycare Inc., located on West Meeting Street in Lancaster, South Carolina, took a group of fourteen children, all under age five, to the outdoor playground and distributed toys that included jump ropes. One teacher was the only adult present. At some point during outdoor play, the teacher found a three-year-old boy unconscious on a slide with one end of a jump rope wrapped around his neck and the other end tied to the top of the slide structure. Emergency responders transported the child to a local hospital; he was later airlifted to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte.
The child's mother, Natasha Brazzell, filed suit against Burbee Place Daycare Inc. in Lancaster County Circuit Court (Case No. 2014-CP-29-00048), alleging the facility failed to supervise the children adequately and placed them in danger by supplying jump ropes to toddlers on a playground with raised platforms. In its answer, the daycare denied wrongdoing but admitted the children were given access to jump ropes.
Kenneth Berger, co-counsel for the family, investigated the daycare's internal practices and found that several teachers had not met state child-care training requirements. The plaintiff alleged those training failures were a root cause of the dangerous conditions that day. Berger noted that distributing jump ropes to three- and four-year-olds on a playground with elevated equipment violates basic child-safety standards.
The plaintiff claimed the boy sustained lasting effects from the oxygen deprivation: behavioral changes, difficulty with attention, disrupted sleep, and measurable reduction in cognitive function compared to his pre-incident baseline.
Circuit Court Judge Brian Gibbons approved a $1 million settlement on April 20, 2016. The amount exhausted Burbee Place Daycare's liability insurance policy limits. Berger worked alongside co-counsel David Yarborough and David Lail of Yarborough Applegate in Charleston.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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