Federal Jury Awards $7.5 Million in Punitive Damages Over an Unstaffed Pool Slide That Drowned an 18-Year-Old
After trial: The verdict was returned in June 2026. No appeal has been reported as of this writing.
Won by Tobias & Comer Law, LLC.
A federal jury in Birmingham awarded Elaine Adams $7.5 million in punitive damages after her 18-year-old son, Reginald Adams, drowned on a pool slide at Riverchase Country Club, finding that the club's operator, Heritage Golf Club, LLC, had deliberately skipped a required second lifeguard.
What happened
Reginald Adams had just graduated from Pelham High School when he went to Riverchase Country Club with friends on August 22, 2023. The club, in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover, operated a public pool with a slide. Adams went down it. He did not come back up on his own.
He was pulled from the water and rushed for emergency treatment, but the time he had spent submerged had already done the damage. Adams suffered an anoxic brain injury, the kind caused by prolonged oxygen deprivation, and was pronounced dead the following day.
Riverchase Country Club held a Class A Public Pool permit from the state, and that permit came with a specific condition: two lifeguards stationed in lifeguard stands during operating hours, one of the basic safeguards required at a pool built around a slide, where a swimmer can go under quickly and out of easy sight. Adams's family alleged in a lawsuit against Heritage Golf Club, LLC, the Virginia-based operator that ran Riverchase as part of the Heritage Golf Group, that the club had not been meeting that requirement. Their case was not that a lifeguard made a mistake in the moment. It was that the club had made a business decision to staff the pool with fewer lifeguards than its own permit required, and that decision was what left no one positioned to see Adams struggling in the water.
Because Heritage Golf Group operates across state lines, the case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama and tried in Birmingham's Robert S. Vance Federal Building rather than in state court. Attorneys Desi Tobias and Lacey Smith of Tobias & Comer Law represented Elaine Adams, Reginald's mother, presenting evidence that the understaffing was not an isolated lapse but a pattern the club had tolerated.
The jury did not need long to decide. After a trial that concluded in early June 2026, it deliberated for roughly 90 minutes before returning its verdict: $7.5 million in punitive damages against Heritage Golf Club, LLC. A punitive award of that size, reached that quickly, reflected a jury persuaded that the club's failure to staff the pool as its own permit required was not carelessness but a choice.
The case drew attention beyond Alabama as an example of a broader pattern in premises liability litigation: permit conditions written specifically to prevent drownings at slides and deep water, and the gap between what a permit requires on paper and what a pool actually staffs on a given afternoon. For the Adams family, the verdict did not change what happened at Riverchase in August 2023. It put a number on what a jury believed that decision cost.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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