Fall through Sidewalk Grate sparks Con Ed Investigation
One of our partners, Kenneth Halperin, was quoted recently in an article about Jessica Hinkmon, the woman who fell into a Manhattan sidewalk grate while walking to work this month.
"It sounds like someone was probably negligent," said Kenneth Halperin, a lawyer at Wingate, Russotti & Shapiro.... "I'm sorry, but you just can't have people falling through the sidewalks in the city of New York."Con Edison has already begun investigating how the sidewalk grate became so defective that one person’s weight could cause it to collapse.
New York City is full of pedestrians, which means we have more than our fair share of pedestrian accidents. While we think the above article overstates the reasons to be afraid while walking through midtown Manhattan, accidents do happen. We’ve successfully litigated many New York pedestrian accidents, including one in which a man walking his dog was seriously injured by a driver who later pled guilty to a DWI; it settled for $2.5 million. Just because there was no car involved in Ms. Hinkmon’s accident doesn’t mean that she couldn’t recover significant damages, if she chooses to pursue them. In fact, we’re willing to bet that the defective grate was the fault of a government agency or a business, in which case she would be suing an organization with more insurance than many drivers -- as well as a legal duty to anticipate and avoid situations like this.
