Products Liability Law Reporter

Evangelos Sardis, 40, was employed by Washington Overhead Door, Inc. One day, he was installing fire door hoods at an apartment building construction site. The fire door hoods arrived in a cardboard crate that was surrounded by a wood frame and weighed 320 pounds. At the end of each cardboard crate, there were two vertical wooden boards on the left and right sides and five horizontal wooden boards screwed or nailed into each of the two vertical boards. Both the crate and the fire door hoods were designed, manufactured, and placed into the stream of commerce by the Overhead Door Corp. (ODC).

Sardis’s supervisor used a power-operated forklift to offload a crate from a truck. As he did so, the crate tilted toward the front of the truck. Sardis then climbed onto the back of the truck, attempting to center the crate on the forklift tines. He gripped one of the crate’s horizonal wooden end boards below a gap in the boards and tugged backward on the crate, which caused a board to come off. This, in turn, caused Sardis to lose his balance and fall backward seven feet to the pavement below, hitting his head and then his back. Sardis suffered a traumatic brain injury and compression fractures at T10-T11, among other severe injuries.

Sardis died of his injuries two weeks later. He had been earning $14 per hour plus overtime and is survived by his wife and infant son. His medical expenses totaled $348,200.

Sardis’s estate sued ODC, alleging it failed to adequately design the crate, failed to warn that the crate’s wooden boards were not strong enough to sustain the force necessary to move the crate and its contents, and breached the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness in that the crate was not of good and merchantable quality and could not perform the function for which it was intended.

The jury awarded more than $4.84 million. The award includes over $1 million to Sardis’s son.

Citation: Sardis v. Overhead Door Corp., No. 3:17CV00818 (E.D. Va. July 29, 2019).

Plaintiff counsel: AAJ members Ethan S. Nochumowitz and Andrew G. Slutkin, both of Baltimore; and AAJ member Peter C. Grenier, Washington, D.C.

Plaintiff experts: Jonathan Arden, forensic pathology, McLean, Va.; S. Paul Singh, packaging and material handling, East Lansing, Mich.; Michael Wogalter, human factors, Raleigh, N.C.; Anthony Bird, vocational rehabilitation, Fairfax, Va.; and Richard Edelman, economics, Bethesda, Md.

Defense experts: Marshall White, packaging design, Blacksburg, Va.; and James Stanley, safety, Franklin, Tenn.