$5M verdict after maintenance pulled a tenant's carbon monoxide detectors and she died hours later
The alarm was doing its job. The jury held the manager responsible for how its staff answered it.
Amount awarded by the jury $5,000,000 Baldwin County Circuit Court · December 2021 · Baldwin County, Alabama
A Baldwin County jury returned a $5 million verdict against the company that managed a Fairhope apartment complex, finding it responsible for the death of a tenant from carbon monoxide poisoning.
On March 25, 2019, the tenant came home from running errands and an alarm in her apartment went off. She called maintenance. Maintenance staff decided that a combination smoke and carbon monoxide detector was the source of the alarm and removed all the detectors from her unit. Hours later she was found unresponsive in her apartment and died.
Her car, which had a keyless ignition, had been left running in her enclosed garage, and it produced the carbon monoxide that killed her, according to her family’s lawyers. They said the management company had not trained its employees properly or met safety codes, and that at trial, almost three years after her death, the building still did not meet safety code requirements.
The verdict came in December 2021 and was announced by the family’s lawyers in January 2022. A representative of the management company said the family’s lawyers had not raised those concerns with the company directly. No appeal or reduction of the award has been reported.
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Not legal advice. Southeast Verdicts reports public court outcomes and news coverage. Parties are anonymized. Amounts are as reported at the time of the verdict or settlement and may have been reduced, appealed or not collected.
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