(12PressRelease.com) In the summer of 2010 we were involved in a trial against the City of New York that was hard fought over many liability issues that have become a virtual battleground in recent years. The City has continually tried to hide behind a wall of unfair laws and restrictive judicial decisions which have slowly whittled away an injured person's right to sue a municipality for negligence. The facts of our case are disturbing:
A 43-year-old woman rode her bike with her boyfriend from the Upper West Side down Central Park West intending to go across the park to get to the east side. This was around 7:30 am on the day before the New York City Marathon in November of 2005. As they arrived at the entrance to the 65th Street transverse (one of the roads that cut across the park) they saw a City worker putting up barricades to close off the very road they had wanted to cross on. They asked the man if it was still okay if they go through on the road he was closing. He said "Sure, go ahead."
What he didn't tell them was that he was closing the road because the roadway under the second overpass about a half a mile east was completely broken up due to a broken sewer main and that there was a crew of 5 men and three trucks waiting to start an excavation and repair at that location.
Without any warnings, signs, cones, flagmen or barricades the woman rode her bike into the pitch black underneath the overpass. Her bike went straight into a pit throwing her forward, smashing her face on the edge of the excavation. She tore her mouth severely, fractured her skull, jaw, nose, and septum, broke numerous teeth, shoved the remainder of her teeth back into her mouth, damaged her tear duct so badly that it required a tube be surgically inserted into her duct and worn continuously for six months, and she sustained permanent vertigo. She underwent 19 plastic surgeries and is left with very obvious cosmetically disfiguring scarring around her mouth and nose that is readily apparent and that cannot be improved with any more plastic surgery.
The issue of pure common law negligence. The man who waved them into the construction site happened to be the foreman on the job that day. He allowed them to ride their bikes on that road despite knowing of the dangers. He clearly acted without reasonable care under the circumstances and was negligent under New York State law. Due to what is known as vicarious liability, the City would be liable for acts of its worker who was in the course of his employment at the time.
We claimed that the City was liable in that it failed to maintain its roadway in a reasonably safe condition for all lawful users. Now under the "Pothole Law" which we discussed previously we needed to show prior written notice. This, in our estimation, we did.
Before we ever got to trial, we went through extensive litigation which in this case took almost five years. During that time, we had to continually go back to court on a regular basis seeking the supervising judge's intervention because not surprisingly the City did not want to cooperate with our extensive requests for documents that they were required to maintain in their various departments that did work at the location in question, namely the Department of Transportation (responsible for roadway maintenance), and the Department of Environmental Protection (responsible for broken water and sewer mains).
For more details please visit:
www.dandalaw.com