Tenant Burned in Apartment Gas Explosion Awarded $25.4 Million After Damages Cap
After trial: Reduced. The judge cut the jury's $47.9 million punitive award to $250,000 under Georgia's punitive damages cap, leaving the compensatory damages and attorney's fees intact.
Won by Law & Moran, Attorneys at Law.
Stephen Wells was engulfed in flames on Memorial Day weekend 2010 when gas from an uncapped line in the Sandy Springs apartment he was moving into ignited as he stepped inside. He suffered burns covering more than half his body and was treated in the burn unit at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. A Fulton County jury found the complex's owner, Aslan Commons, LLC, and its manager, WSE LLC, fully responsible and awarded $17.9 million in compensatory damages, $7.16 million in attorney's fees, and $47.9 million in punitive damages, a total of about $73 million. The trial judge then applied Georgia's statutory cap to reduce the punitive award to $250,000, bringing the enforceable judgment to about $25.4 million.
What happened
Stephen Wells was moving his belongings from one unit to another at The Edgewater Apartments in Sandy Springs, north of Atlanta, over Memorial Day weekend in 2010. The unit he was moving into had a furnace closet holding a gas line meant to serve a gas-powered clothes dryer. Wells used an electric dryer and testified he did not know the line was there. It had never been capped.
Gas company records showed the shutoff valve in that closet was turned on about two hours before the explosion. Gas flowed through the uncapped line and filled the apartment. Wells told jurors he heard a noise like something igniting, then a boom, and a ball of fire came out of the hallway and past him.
Burns covered more than half of his body. He was taken to the burn unit at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta for treatment. At trial his attorneys told jurors the uncapped line was not an isolated oversight: 57 other units in the same complex lacked caps on their dryer gas lines.
Wells sued the complex's owner, Aslan Commons, LLC, and its management company, WSE LLC, arguing they were negligent for failing to cap a gas line that building code required to be capped, and for placing the shutoff valve in a different room from the dryer connection, which his counsel called a second code violation. Who turned the valve on was the central dispute. Wells testified a maintenance man had entered the apartment shortly before the gas was turned on, after he reported an air conditioning problem. The defendants countered that Wells himself had opened the valve while trying to light the hot water heater and left without closing it. The case went to trial in Fulton County State Court in Atlanta before Judge Eric Richardson, with Peter Law and Michael Moran of Law & Moran representing Wells.
The jury sided entirely with Wells. On January 15, 2015, it found the defendants 100 percent responsible and awarded $17.9 million in compensatory damages plus $7.16 million in attorney's fees. Jurors also found the defendants' conduct warranted punitive damages and set that award at $47.9 million, bringing the total to about $73 million.
Georgia law caps punitive damages at $250,000 in most personal injury cases, regardless of what a jury awards, unless the defendant acted with a specific intent to harm. Judge Richardson applied that cap, O.C.G.A. 51-12-5.1, and reduced the $47.9 million punitive award to $250,000. With the compensatory damages and attorney's fees left untouched, the enforceable judgment came to about $25.4 million.
Wells' attorneys said at the time that they planned to challenge the constitutionality of the cap itself and were prepared to take that argument to the state's highest court. No published appellate ruling resolving that challenge has surfaced. The $25.4 million judgment is the last amount independently confirmed to stand.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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