Slip and Fall Victim Awarded Settlement for Serious Injuries

Clare Doe* v Insurance Company of an Apartment Owner

Slip and Fall - Personal Injury Case

Presented here is an actual case of a slip and fall injury which was successfully handled by the Mesriani Law and Associates for injured victim Ms. Clare Doe.

The accident occurred on the evening of January 22, 2006 at a Los Angeles apartment where Ms. Doe occupies a basement unit as a tenant.

According to Ms. Doe’s account, she had just finished doing her laundry at the ground floor and was descending the stairways leading to her unit, when she suddenly slipped and fell a flight of stairs. To prevent her fall, she dropped the laundry basket she was carrying and tried to grab on to something. But apparently, the stairway has no handrail on its right side and she fell and landed on top of her laundry basket.

Doe suffered a scraped knee and severe back pain as a result of the accident.

According to Doe, the accident should have been prevented had the apartment owner made the necessary action on their complaints as similar incidents had already occurred in the past but the owner neglected to act on it.

Ms. Doe pointed the cause of the accident to two factors:

• An unlit stairway


• Defective design of the stairway

However, further investigations revealed more. On July 19, 2006, Jay William Preston, CSP, PE., a California Licensed Professional Safety Engineer, made an inspection of the accident site and found several defects of the stairway. Among them:

1. Absence of a right side descending hand rail making it unavailable for guiding a stairway user down in a normal path or for arresting a fall should on begin


2. Left side descending handrail was located at such a height that was unavailable


3. Highly irregular tread and riser dimensions which break the natural rhythm of stairway users and make it difficult to recover from a fall


4. Inadequate lighting for the passageway making it difficult or impossible to see the nature of the stairway features and conditions


5. Excessive angles to ramps serving as treads or landing on the stairway


6. Low riser at the end of the first ramp was so low as to be difficult to discern.


7. Finally, Mr. Preston concluded that the stairway arrangement is in violation of the LAMBC sections that prescribe regularity in tread and riser dimensions, maximum slopes for ramps, minimum riser heights, handrail placement, and illuminance levels.

Mr. Preston concluded that the combination of these violations “are the proximate cause of the Doe’s fall” and “[w]ere the stairway free of the defects, the Doe accident would probably not have occurred or its severity would have been really reduced.”

Mr. Preston also found a violation of the local regulation, specifically, Section 91.3305 (I) of the Los Angeles Municipal Building Code, to cite:

91.3305 (I). “Handrails. Stairways shall have handrails on each side, and every stairway required to be more than 88 inches in width shall be provided with not less than one intermediate handrail for each 88 inches of required width. Intermediate handrails shall be spaced approximately equal within the entire width of the stairway. (Emphasis and underscoring supplied).”

The following morning after the accident, Ms. Doe woke up with severe pain on the upper part of her left ankle.

The following months after the accident, Doe’s conditions worsened and she had to undergo several medical examinations and treatment and eventually a surgical operation.

• Longevity Acupuncture (January 23, 2006) – chiropractor and acupuncture treatment


• Verdugo Hills Medical Associates (February 26, 2006) – lumbar spine radiograph


• Noushin Haddad-Terrani, MD, of Healthcare Partners Medical Group (February 27 and April 25) – for clinical evaluation


• Philip M. Girard, M.D (March 2 and March 7)- for further evaluation


• Glendale MRI Institute (March 7)– lumbar spine MRI


• Philip M. Girard, M.D , Pasadena Rehabilitation Institute (March 9) – for lesion treatment with a periradicular block on the left via anesthesia


• Clayton Varga, M.D. (March 10 and April 17) – medical evaluation and steroid injection


• Viliam Furdik, M.D., a surgeon at the Pasadena Surgery Center (March 15, April 4 and 18) – for L5 transforaminal selective nerve root block epidural injections under fluoroscopic guidance with epidurography at the Pasadena Surgery Center


• Kyoo S. Ro, M.D., neurosurgeon (April 19, 2006) - for neurosurgical evaluation


• Glendale Memorial Hospital and Health Center with Dr Ro as surgeon (May 5, 2006) - Ms. Doe underwent lumbar laminotomy, foraminotomy and microdiskectomy for disk fragment removal.

Despite that, Doe continued to experience pain and numbness which prompted her to see P. Richard Emmanuel, M.D. of the Southern California Orthopedic and Musculoskeletal Associates, on July 5, 2006. Dr Emmanuel examined Ms Doe and reviewed her MRI and medical records. Based on it, he concluded that Ms Doe has a greater risk of developing accelerated adjacent disc level disease.

Added to this, Dr. Emmanuel recommended future medical care consisting of surgical intervention in the form of revision decompression with instrumented inter-body fusion, which would cost about $76,750.00.

Further, the doctor noted that Ms. Doe’s symptoms, description of injury and findings on physical examination are consistent with the mechanism of injury as described by Ms. Doe and are a direct result of the slip and fall accident.

Ms Doe’s life has changed so much since the accident. Her activities were limited to doing light tasks and less physical work. On advice of his doctor, her intended visit to her grandmother was indefinitely postponed. Ultimately, her career, relationships and lifestyle were affected by her injuries which led to mental distress, emotional pain, suffering, and severe depression.

On November 2006, the Mesriani Law and Associates, in behalf of Ms. Doe, wrote a letter to Farmer’s Insurance, the apartment owner’s insurer, to demand settlement for her claims.

The sum of settlement amounted to $956,308.23, which is comprised of $64,558.23 for her initial medical bills, $76,750.00 for future surgery, $15,000.00 for lost earnings, and $800,000.00 for her pain and suffering.

Aside from the actual damages and medical expenses incurred as a result of the incident, Ms Doe also claimed compensation for substantial losses in earnings, equivalent to $15,000, due to her failure to attend to her job as freelance writer and personal chef.

* We have changed the real name of our client to protect her identity.