$2 Million
On October 16, 2016, plaintiff Anne McDonald was touring the Noah Webster House Museum in West Hartford, CT when she fell off the stairs leading to the attic. She and her companions had been invited to tour the attic by the museum’s executive director. The stairs were antiquated, poorly lit, and without a handrail. McDonald sustained a traumatic brain injury, in addition to a fractured shoulder, when she fell onto a hard wooden floor. The challenges to pursuing this case were that no one saw the incident and McDonald had no memory of it. However, by piecing together the testimony of her co-workers, who accompanied her on the tour, Attorney Stewart Casper was able to demonstrate how unsafe the attic stairs were. Casper also put McDonald in touch with one of the best brain injury medicine specialists in the country. The result of this effort was that the case settled on July 6, 2020 for the museum’s insurance policy limit of $2 million.
