We represented a young toddler whom was injured when a dangerous door was known to the staff at a day care and never fixed. The door would close dangerously fast due to it being broken. One day, at this daycare in San Antonio, this door closed and amputated a portion of our clients finger.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases. A podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
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Justin Hill: Sometimes we end up representing parents when their children were injured. As you can imagine these are pretty tough situations because parents are very protective of their children, and they’re scared, and their kids are hurt. They want to make sure they’re making the right choice not only for themselves but for their children. We recently settled a case that arose from an injury at a daycare center. Our clients had a three-year-old daughter who was at a daycare center in San Antonio, Texas. While she was at that daycare center, the teacher was leaving the class. The procedure was that if a teacher left the class, the class had to be moved from one classroom to the other so that another teacher could monitor the kids. They weren’t to be left alone. While they were moving from one class to another, the teacher let the door start to close. What we didn’t know was that this door did not have a soft close mechanism. All the other doors did but this door was broken. This door was broken, and they knew it was broken.
The reason you want soft close mechanisms is because of pinch points. In schools with a bunch of little children those are very important. What happened was our client’s young daughter had her hand in the door hinge and when this door closed quickly it popped off and cut off a portion of her finger. As you can imagine the parents were scared, and angry, and upset. They’re worried about their daughter. It was a very traumatic situation for them and their daughter. When they went to the school to get answers they were told by one of the teachers who was speaking freely. Freely means before she had been told what to say or not say by an insurance company that that door had been broken for a while. They knew it was broken. They needed to fix it. They had talked about fixing it. They knew they had something on the premises that was dangerous that could have injured a child. When it did injure a child this teacher was honest enough to admit it.
Luckily for this young lady, her hand, her finger healed without too many complications. The unsightliness of it has gotten better. The scar has improved, the fingernail that they weren’t sure if it would return has come back. This case was able to resolve very early on. The day care center did not want to deal with a injury lawsuit regarding one of their injured toddlers. This case was able to resolve for a fair amount that the parents wanted to take. An amount that I think was very fair under the circumstances. In the end, it will be an amount that will likely pay for all of this young lady’s college. It has paid off all of her past medical bills.
We represent a lot of people who come to see us over the injuries to their children. It is one of the things that we really enjoy doing is being able to represent children, people who are not at fault for their injuries, people who we should all be looking out for. We’ve handled a lot of cases involving kids that are injured, and we’ll talk more about those on the Hill Law Firm cases podcast.