Our client, a 62-year-old medical transcriptionist, went to a friend’s condominium complex for a visit. When she finished eating dinner on this particular occasion, it began to rain. This required her to depart through the front door and into an enclosed interior hallway. As she exited the front door, she stepped onto a small, carpeted threshold that intersected the common hallway. The carpet was identical to the carpet that adorned the hallway, and could only be described as a geometric, somewhat psychedelic pattern that created the optical effect that the threshold and the hallway were on the same level. As she entered the hallway, she failed to appreciate the seven-inch step from the threshold down to the hallway and as a result, she tripped and fell.
After she fell, she was initially treated for a suspected fractured kneecap and strained ligaments in her ankles. However, three months later, she began treating with her neurologist who had followed her for a prior 1993 automobile accident and he focused on her low back pain and increasing numbness and parenthesis in her right leg and calf. Due to the relentless nature of her radiating pain, she was referred to a neurosurgeon. After a lengthy series of failed back procedures, she had an instrumented spinal fusion.
Sam Cacciatore was able to obtain a settlement of $600,000.00.
