Falling Store Display Fractures a 7-Year-Old's Skull; Premises Case Settles for $9 Million
Won by Marks & Harrison.
A heavy retail display toppled onto a 7-year-old, fracturing the child's skull and forcing emergency brain surgery, and Marks & Harrison resolved the premises liability case for $9 million.
What happened
A heavy merchandise display inside a retail store fell onto a 7-year-old child. There were no witnesses, and the child kept no memory of the moment it happened. The weight of the fixture fractured the child's skull and caused a brain injury serious enough to require emergency surgery, followed by six days in the hospital. Months went by before the child returned to school.
The case was harder than the bare facts suggest. Before the accident, the child already lived with a significant condition tied to lifelong cognitive challenges and was receiving speech therapy under an individualized education program. Post-incident neuropsychological testing showed impairments, but no one had measured the child's abilities before the display came down. That missing baseline gave the defense room to argue that any deficits traced back to the earlier condition rather than the fallen fixture.
Marks & Harrison attorneys Ryan Walker, Joel McClellan, and James McCauley, working with co-counsel Edward Scher of the Law Office of Edward Scher in Richmond, did not rush the filing. They waited several years so the lasting effects of the injury could come into focus as the child grew, then built the liability case from inside the defendant company's own files.
Discovery did most of the work. The display came from a large order used in the company's stores across the country, and the company's records showed it knew the problem. Some of the displays were unstable or had been damaged in shipping. Several had already toppled over. All of them were scheduled for a manufacturer retrofit meant to make them less likely to fail. The store kept this display in service before that retrofit was installed.
The first day set aside for mediation ended with no agreement. Weeks later, with continued help from retired Judge Thomas S. Shadrick, the parties reached a $9 million settlement. Because the matter resolved by agreement rather than a jury verdict, the figure was not subject to remittitur or reduction on appeal. Part of the recovery went into a structured settlement arranged by Ron Feinman of One World Structured Settlement Design. The child's medical bills came to $200,552.03, and the store and the parent company were not publicly identified.
Virginia Lawyers Weekly ranked the recovery the third-largest settlement reported across the state for 2023.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Marks & Harrison
All Marks & Harrison proven verdicts →A tractor-trailer drifted into a retired 20-year veteran's lane on Interstate 95 North and killed him, and Marks & Harrison recovered $10 million for his family before any lawsuit was filed.
A City of Richmond worker suffered permanent brain damage when a runaway Norfolk Southern boxcar with a missing brake rod drove a floodwall gate into him, and a Richmond jury returned a $10 million verdict.
In February 2015 a Chesterfield County, Virginia police officer fired a Taser at Miles November, a 27-year-old man trapped in a wrecked car soaked in gasoline after a police chase. His clothing ignited and he suffered burns over most of his body, followed by months in the hospital and more than 30 surgeries. He sued the county and the officer in federal court in Richmond. The case settled in 2018 for $6.5 million, paid by the county's commercial insurer and its self-insurance fund.
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