HIP FRACTURE SUSTAINED BY ELDERLY WOMAN IN OAKLAND DUE TO FAULTY GARAGE DOOR; CASE WON ON PREMISES LIABILITY, NEGLIGENCE AND PRODUCT LIABILITY CAUSES OF ACTION
Our client suffered a hip fracture injury when she was struck by a garage door that suddenly swung open at her apartment complex in Oakland, California in Alameda County. She was an elderly lady, and a broken hip is a serious type of personal injury for an elderly person as only one in four patients typically recovers completely. In the United States, hip fractures are the most common broken bone that requires hospitalization; about 300,000 Americans are hospitalized for a hip fracture every year. Many hip fractures are sustained by the elderly in slip and fall accidents, however our client broke her hip as a result of negligence, product liability and premises liability. She had been standing on the sidewalk in front of her apartment house for her friend to pick her up. Suddenly a metal garage door swung open, and before she could move, the gate struck her causing a broken hip. We sued both the owner of the apartment as well as the gate installer, and we successfully settled the case for substantial six figures.
Personal injury attorneys can often have a challenging time proving liability when the evidence is no longer present. By the time we were retained on the case, the opening mechanism on the gate had been replaced and the old one had been discarded. We hired experts to reconstruct the accident and to try and figure out why the gate opened when there was no car in the vicinity. We also retained an expert on the design of the gate. Our experts concluded that the installer and premises owner were negligent for installing a gate that swung up instead of sliding to the left or right and for swinging out toward the sidewalk instead of inward toward the inside of the garage. They also concluded that this was a product defect case as the mechanism to open the gate should not have been a beeper that could go off from afar, instead of a card system that the car exiting the garage would insert in a post to open the gate. The defense alleged that our client was negligent for standing too close to the gate when she knew from having lived there many years that the gate opened out toward the sidewalk and that it opened from a beeper in a car that could be some distance from the gate. Despite this being a difficult accident case, we settled on behalf of our client for substantial six figures.
If you or a loved one has been the victim of an accident or slip and fall and have sustained a hip fracture, please call us at the Law Offices of Greenberg & Rudman 1-800-ALAWPRO for a free consultation in California.
