$55.5 Million Crane Collapse Award to the Kurtaj Family

On the morning of May 30, 2008, a 205 foot Kodiak tower crane was lifting a basket of electricians' tools at a high rise construction site at 331-333 East 91st Street in Manhattan when it began to tip backward. The cab, boom, and counterweights sheared off the top of the tower, struck the apartment building across the street, bounced off terraces, and crashed to the ground. The crane's operator, Donald Leo, 30, rode the glass cab down. Ramadan Kurtaj, a 27 year old construction worker from Kosovo working below, was crushed under crane components weighing more than 25,000 pounds. He was conscious and screaming in the wreckage, was doused in diesel fuel, and survived roughly four hours before dying at the hospital.

The civil case that followed turned on a single part: the crane's turntable bearing ring. When the original cracked in 2007, the manufacturer quoted the crane's owner, James Lomma of New York Crane & Equipment Corp., $120,127 to expedite a proper replacement. Lomma instead had an employee find RTR Bearing Company, a Chinese broker located through a Google search, which agreed to make the part for $20,000. RTR emailed that it did not have confidence in its own welding for so critical a component. Lomma let it weld the ring anyway, and when no engineer would certify the replacement for the Department of Buildings, Lomma, who is not an engineer, certified it himself. Jurors heard that the weld failed and the turntable ripped apart like a zipper opening. Lomma had been acquitted of manslaughter in a 2012 criminal trial, so the wrongful death suits brought by the two families were the only public reckoning left.

Susan M. Karten of Susan M. Karten & Associates represented Kurtaj's family from the start, through a first trial that ended in a May 2014 mistrial when Lomma was hurt in a car accident during jury selection, and then through a retrial before Justice Manuel Mendez that ran about eleven months with more than 87 witnesses, widely described as the longest civil trial in Manhattan Supreme Court history. On July 30, 2015 the jury pierced the corporate veils of Lomma's companies and awarded $47.8 million in compensatory damages, about $32 million of it to Kurtaj's family. On August 3, 2015 it added $24 million in punitive damages for each family, $48 million in all, bringing the combined verdicts to roughly $96 million. "You've inspired us. It's been a long seven years," Karten told the jurors. Against the Lomma defendants, the Kurtaj awards were $7.5 million for the terror of the seconds before impact, $24 million for his hours of conscious pain and suffering, and the $24 million punitive award: $55.5 million. The Leo family, represented at trial by Bernadette Panzella, was awarded $39.5 million in the same categories.

The appeal took most of it back, and that is part of this record too. On September 12, 2017 the First Department upheld the liability findings in full, including the veil piercing and punitive damages, and its opinion recounts Lomma's conduct in unsparing detail. But it held the amounts materially deviated from reasonable compensation and ordered a new damages trial unless the families accepted reduced sums. For Kurtaj that meant $2 million for preimpact terror, $7.5 million for pain and suffering, and $9.5 million in punitive damages, $19 million in total; for the Leo estate, $16 million. The combined awards dropped from roughly $96 million to about $35 million. The verdict still stands among the largest wrongful death results in New York history, and the appellate opinion, which lists Susan M. Karten & Associates, LLP as counsel for the Kurtaj administrators, preserved something no reduction could touch: a final judicial finding that Lomma's conduct was reprehensible enough to warrant punitive damages.