Maker of ‘Suicide Doors’ for Jeeps Hit With $19.2-Million Jury Award
In what is thought to be the largest jury award of its kind in the state, a Missouri firm that manufactured so-called “suicide doors” for Jeeps was ordered Wednesday to pay $19.2 million in damages to an 8-year-old Canyon Country girl who fell out one of the doors and was run over by another car.
The doors, which have not been used on American cars for more than a decade because of safety concerns, open from the front of the vehicle toward the rear.
Nichole Fortman, who was 3 at the time of the accident, is permanently paralyzed below the waist and will never reach a mental level above that of a 5-year-old, according to testimony during the trial in Van Nuys Superior Court.
She was injured in November, 1981, after she leaned against the passenger door handle of a Jeep driven by her mother, witnesses testified. The door opened and Nichole fell out of the vehicle while it was traveling about 30 m.p.h. on Roscoe Boulevard in Northridge.
After 4 1/2 days of deliberations, the jury concluded that the door design was defective and ordered Hemco Inc. of Independence, Mo., to pay Nichole $23.7 million--$17.7 for medical expenses and future lost wages and $6 million for pain and suffering.
The $6 million was reduced to $1.5 million, however, after Judge G. Keith Wisot ruled that Proposition 51, the “deep-pockets” initiative approved by voters in June, applied retroactively in the case. The sum was reduced based on the jury’s determination that the girl’s mother was 75% responsible for her injuries for failing to lock the door and restrain the child with a seat belt.
Proposition 51 limits each defendant’s share of non-economic damages, such as those for pain and suffering, to the percentage of its share of fault. Hemco remains responsible for the full amount of economic damages--unless the verdict is overturned on appeal--but has the right to sue Nichole’s mother, Debra Lynn Fortman, to recover 75% of the award.
Suit Called Futile
But the Fortman family’s attorney, Lawrence P. Grassini, said the mother is unemployed and has no significant assets, making a cross-complaint futile.
“This was a woman who routinely buckled her child and who, on this one day, forgot,” Grassini said. “It’s a parent’s worst nightmare, and she has to live with that every day, looking at her child in a wheelchair.”
The attorney for Hemco said the company will appeal the judgment.
According to officials at Verdictum Juris, a Claremont firm that tracks jury verdicts in civil cases, the award is the largest in the state in a personal injury case where punitive damages were not considered. The next closest was a $14.7-million award in 1985 by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury to a young gymnast who was injured on a defective trampoline.
Although Hemco was the only remaining defendant when the case went to trial, other defendants, including the vehicle’s manufacturer and the hardware firm that distributed the door handle, settled out of court for a total of $3.9 million, Grassini said.
Grassini argued to the jury that the door of the Fortman’s 1969 AMC CJ-5 Jeep was inherently unsafe because it did not contain an arm rest, the handle was not recessed into a well and the door opened from front to rear.
The doors are sometimes called “suicide doors” in the auto industry, but, at the request of the defense, the judge instructed witnesses and attorneys in the case not to use that term.
Defense attorney James L. Moser asserted that the door is safe when its double-locking device is used and seat belts are employed. He also argued that Hemco did not design the door, but merely manufactured the fiberglass mold at the request of another company, which had conducted safety tests.
