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From the Louisiana bureau comes this report of a new case filed on May 11:
The summary above—which, if the image is missing, says “Plaintiffs’ children suffered injuries when a prosthetic leg flew though the air off of [sic] a guest patron riding a separate ride and struck the children while on a ride”—turns out to be not quite accurate. Thanks to Courthouse News Network for posting the complaint (having also immediately realized the newsworthiness of this particular item).
Two initial things to note about the complaint: (1) Louisiana seems to still be using “legal-size” paper for its filings, which may not be high on the list of crimes against humanity but is there somewhere; and (2) the caption above contains only the parents’ names, not those of the minor children, or else I’d have redacted them. And now let us move immediately to the relevant paragraph.
Paragraph five tells us that “[o]n or about May 12, 2024,” the three children were “guest patrons of the Terry Town Spring Fair located at the Oakwood Center Parking Lot” in Jefferson Parish. Then:
suddenly and without warning, a prosthetic leg came flying through the air from a guest patron on a nearby ride operated by Defendant, JOHN DOE. The prosthesis then struck the ground, bounced up, and struck the minor children, [NAMES REDACTED]…. Additionally, the prosthesis then also fell to the ground once again, bounced up, and struck the minor child [NAME REDACTED].
Happily, it doesn’t sound like the injuries were serious, but sadly, those are all the facts we get.
Based on these allegations, it would appear the summary above was wrong to suggest that the children were struck directly by the prosthesis as it flew through the air. Said prosthesis allegedly hit the ground first and connected with two of the children only on the bounce. The bounce would have reduced the force of the impact, but it’s hard to say by how much. (I do know that at least two experts will have at least two opinions on it.) Nor does the complaint allege that the children were themselves on a ride at the time, as the summary also suggests. They seem to have been on the ground nearby.
In what seems like an even less plausible allegation, the paragraph goes on to say that after bouncing and then striking the first two children, the prosthesis then “also fell to the ground once again,” bounced again, and only then hit the remarkably unlucky third child who happened to be standing at the end of its final vector.
This of course is not impossible. I don’t think of prosthetic legs as being likely to “bounce,” but if this happened in a parking lot and not a grassy field, that surface would have been more likely to yield at least one ricochet. But could the leg have had enough energy after bouncing four times (ground, child, child, ground) to still inflict injury on its fifth impact? Maybe. But that would depend heavily on the circumstances of its launching, facts we are not given.
And those facts are going to be quite important. Plaintiffs are blaming the ride operator for this incident, and of course his employer through vicarious liability. In paragraph eight, the complaint briefly alludes to what I think could be a major problem for the plaintiffs: the contention that the employer “had a duty … to ensure that its employees did not create any hazardous conditions that could be reasonably foreseen,” emphasis added. In my experience, that would come down to whether there is evidence of prior similar incidents that could have put the employer on notice that something like this would be reasonably likely. None are alleged. Nor could I find any.
It frankly surprised me to find that a Westlaw search for “struck /s ‘prosthetic leg'” yielded not a single case. But that was the result. Expanding the search a little yielded two reported cases in which someone allegedly beat or threatened to beat the owner of a prosthetic leg after forcibly removing it, and one less plausible case in which a defendant removed his own leg and then somehow remained upright while beating the victim with it. (It was a group assault so he may have had help.) Such things do happen. See, e.g., “Third Man Beaten With Own Leg by Leg-Wielding Girlfriend” (Apr. 17, 2019) (with links to the first two incidents).
But I found no prior cases, and have reported no incidents, in which someone was allegedly struck by a prosthetic leg that had been inadvertently detached and flung through the air by the forces generated during a carnival ride, regardless of the number of bounces involved. So I think foreseeability is going to be an issue here.
I would not be entirely sorry to learn otherwise, I have to admit.
