Our Seattle injury attorney was not involved in the lawsuit described in this article.
In an unpublished opinion the Washington Court of Appeals recently reversed dismissal of an injury claim of a Tacoma woman who fell on a set of stairs.
According to Smith, the injury victim, the third step from the top of the staircase moved under her feet as she descended the staircase, causing her to slip and fall. As she fell, Smith placed her right hand onto the railing, but could not adequately grip the railing because it was approximately six inches wide. Smith hit her head and rib cage as she fell, causing her to black out. Prior to her fall, Smith had never noticed the third step was loose and had never heard others complain about the condition of the third step. In the month before her fall, however, Smith noticed that steps lower on the staircase were loose and had informed her employer.
Suzanne Kline, a co-worker, had also observed several of the lower steps were loose in the month before Smith fell. According to Robert Mattson, the property manager, he visited the office building almost daily and routinely walked up and down each stairway in the building. Before Smith’s fall, Mattson never felt any instability in any of the steps that gave him cause for concern, and he had never received any complaints about the staircase. Additionally, the City of Tacoma conducted a fire and safety inspection in 2005 or 2006 and did not find any safety violations related to the stairway. In the hours following Smith’s fall, Mattson inspected the stairway and discovered that three of the top steps were loose. He tightened the bolts supporting each loose step and replaced the entire staircase the following weekend.
A property owner has constructive notice where the condition “has existed for such time as would have afforded [the owner] sufficient opportunity, in the exercise of ordinary care, to have made a proper inspection of the premises and to have removed the danger.”[1] Determining whether a defective condition has existed long enough for a property owner exercising reasonable care to discover it is ordinarily a question of fact for the jury.[2]
The defendants argued that that Smith did not present sufficient evidence showing that they had actual or constructive notice of the existing danger, triggering a duty to fix the staircase. Winther and the Mattsons contend that they had no notice that the step that actually caused Smith’s injury, the third step from the top of the staircase, was either dangerous or unsafe prior to Smith’s accident.
But Smith presented evidence that several of the lower steps were loose for at least a month before her fall, and Robert Mattson admitted that the top three steps were unstable when he inspected the staircase immediately following the accident.
The Court of Appeals ruled that a jury could reasonably infer from this evidence that the entire staircase, including the third step from the top, was deteriorating throughout the month before Smith’s accident and accordingly reversed the summary judgment order and remanded for a jury to determine the ultimate issue of whether Winther and the Mattsons breached a duty of care to Smith that proximately caused an injury.
[1] Ingersoll v. DeBartolo, Inc., 123 Wn.2d 649, 652, 869 P.2d 1014 (1994).
[2] Coleman v. Ernst Home Ctr., Inc., 70 Wn. App. 213, 220, 853 P.2d 473 (1993).