In an opinion released today, the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed a damages award to a man who sustained serious injuries after falling on a pedestrian bridge at his apartment complex. The Court held that the owner and operator of the apartment complex, Mid-America Apartments, LP (“MAA”), had a duty to maintain safe conditions on the bridge. The issue in this case was whether the owner could have discovered the dangerous conditions beforehand through proper diligence- a legal presumption known as constructive notice. The Court concluded that the dangerous condition of the bridge at the time of Mr. Trentham’s fall was a “general or continuing condition” that was reasonably foreseeable to MAA, which meant MAA had constructive notice.
In his premises-liability lawsuit, Robert Trentham, the plaintiff, alleged that his fall was due to microbial growth on the bridge that MAA should have known about and addressed. MAA had a policy that called for pressure washing the bridge yearly to keep it safe, but it provided no evidence that the bridge had been pressure washed during the year before the accident. The trial court found that a slimy, microbial growth was present at the time of Mr. Trentham’s fall and that MAA should have known that the pedestrian bridge would become dangerously slick without regular pressure-washing.
The Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s decision.
In a 4-1 decision, the Supreme Court affirmed that decision and the trial court’s damages award of more than $2 million to Mr. Trentham. In reaching this conclusion, the Court reaffirmed its long-standing precedent governing premises liability cases in Tennessee set forth in Blair v. W. Town Mall, 130 S.W.3d 761 (Tenn. 2004).
Justice Sarah K. Campbell dissented from the majority’s ruling. Justice Campbell concluded that MAA lacked constructive knowledge of the dangerous condition on the bridge because there was no evidence that a similar condition had ever occurred previously on the bridge or elsewhere on the property. In her view, the majority opinion extended rather than followed the Court’s precedents by imposing a duty on a property owner in these circumstances.
To read the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Trentham v. Mid-America Apartments, LP, authored by Justice Jeff Bivins, and the dissenting opinion by Justice Sarah Campbell, visit the opinions section of TNCourts.gov.