$25 Million Verdict After 3-Year-Old Died in Corded Blind the Maker Could Have Fitted With a Tilt Wand
After trial: The $24,000,000 to the family is compensatory, not punitive. No Utah appellate record has been found, so it is not confirmed that judgment was entered on the full $25,000,000, whether Century Blinds appealed, or how the award was apportioned among co-defendants.
Won by Mortensen & Milne.
A 3-year-old girl was found with a window blind cord wrapped around her neck at her family's home in Lehi. She died a week later of brain damage from oxygen deprivation. The jury found Century Blinds had made corded blinds for years without fitting a tilt wand that cost nothing extra, and without supplying the cleats that let a parent wind cords out of reach.
What happened
On November 22, 2016 a 3-year-old girl got tangled in the loose cord of a window blind at her family's home in Lehi, Utah. Her mother found her with the cord wrapped around her neck and performed CPR until paramedics came.
She was flown to Primary Children's Hospital. Imaging showed extensive brain damage from oxygen deprivation. She was placed on a ventilator, and she died a week later, on November 29, 2016.
The case her parents, Reno and Sunny Mahe, brought on behalf of her estate was about a choice the manufacturer made and kept making. Century Blinds built corded blinds for years using a tilt cord it knew was a strangulation hazard to small children, when a tilt wand, which does the same job and cannot loop around a child's neck, would have cost nothing additional to fit instead. It also did not supply the cord cleats that let a parent wind loose cords up and out of a child's reach.
The jury found Century Blinds liable on five separate theories: design defect, defective warning, negligent design, negligent warning, and negligent post-sale warning. That last one matters, because it means the duty did not end when the blind left the factory. The jury also made the findings required to support punitive damages.
On September 22 and 23, 2021 the Third District Court jury in Salt Lake County awarded $25,000,000: $1,000,000 to the child's estate for her own suffering and $24,000,000 in compensatory damages to her family.
The family was represented by Alan W. Mortensen, who led the case, with Lance Milne.
The child is not named here because she was three years old.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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