A Dallas County jury awarded more than $860 million to the parents of a woman killed in 2019 when a 200-foot steel crane toppled onto her apartment building from an adjacent construction site.
The verdict, returned on the first day of deliberations, exceeded the $700 million suggested a day earlier in closing arguments by the family’s lead trial attorney, Jason Itkin of Arnold & Itkin in Houston.
He said the crane failed because of grave, persistent safety lapses by the site’s owner, developer and construction contractor, all of them business entities affiliated with Greystar, a multibillion-dollar builder and manager of rental housing worldwide.
“They don’t value life. They value profitability,” Itkin said in his closing argument.
“What you answer today could literally save a life or lives.”
Itkin, his brother Cory Itkin and Michael P. Lyons of Lyons & Simmons in Dallas were the principal lawyers for Michele Williams and James Kirkwood, the mother and father of Kiersten Smith, a 29-year-old bride-to-be who was crushed in her apartment, her fiancé standing just feet away, when the crane fell onto her Old East Dallas apartment building during a violent storm on June 9, 2019. Several other people in the Elan City Lights apartments were injured.
After the verdict was returned, the plaintiffs’ team issued a statement saying:
“The defendants … tried to deny their obvious responsibility for this preventable deadly tragedy, and we are grateful to the jury for holding them accountable and granting a punitive verdict that sends a message that says big companies cannot afford to be reckless with people’s lives.”
The defendant Greystar entities were represented by, among others, Christopher C. White, managing partner of the Dallas office of Lewis Brisbois, and Dana Alden Fox, a partner in the firm’s Los Angeles office.
Greystar said in a written statement: “First and foremost, Greystar Development & Construction LP and Gabriella Tower LLC express our deepest sympathies to the family impacted by this tragedy. We would also like to thank the jury for its work in this case. We strongly believe, however, that the verdict is unfair and unreasonable and is not supported by the evidence. We are therefore evaluating our options.”
In his closing argument, White said Greystar did nothing wrong and blamed a co-defendant, Bigge Crane and Rigging Co, the owner and lessor of the crane. But Itkin sought no damages against Bigge, which was represented at trial by Darrell L. Barger, a partner in the Corpus Christi and Houston offices of Hartline Barger, and by Clayton J. Callan from the Austin office of Bowman and Brook.
Bigge contended that under the terms of its lease agreement with Greystar, the latter was solely responsible for operating the crane, inspecting and maintaining it, and supervising its operator once Bigge delivered it and set it up.
“Bigge had nothing to do with this accident – zero,” Barger said in his closing argument.
Itkin agreed.
“We sued Bigge, no doubt about it,” he said. But from the mountain of evidence uncovered since the accident, he said, “we did not find that Bigge was negligent. We looked. The answer is no.”
The trial, in the courtroom of Dallas County Court of Law of Judge Melissa Ballan, took two weeks.
After Itkin told the jurors his clients deserved at least $700 million, White, Greystar’s lawyer, said if the jury found that damages were warranted at all they should not exceed $13.25 million. And Bigge, not his clients, should be held liable for them.
“We believe the damages Mr. Itkin is asking for are unreasonable and unfair,” he said. “We’re on two different planets here.”
Itkin said a steep award was more than warranted.
“It is not fair or reasonable that this company dropped a crane on Kiersten’s apartment. It is not fair that she was ripped from her mother.”
“There is no amount of money that she would trade for just one more day with Kiersten.”
He began his closing argument by telling the jurors, “What you answer today could literally save a life or lives.”
He said the way to make Greystar remedy what he described as a callous inattention to safety on its worksites was to slap the company with a verdict that got the attention of “the big shots” in “the office.”
“Make it matter to them,” he said, pointing vigorously at the crowded defense table.
Investigators determined – and both sides in the lawsuit agree – that the crane, on a site where Greystar was building an apartment tower near Live Oak and U.S. 75, was blown over in a severe storm because it had not been “weathervaned,” meaning its long arm, or boom, hadn’t been unlocked from the tower supporting it so it could rotate with the wind, rather than being hit broadside.
The crane operator, Robert Hilty, testified at trial and in a deposition that he did weathervane the crane before knocking off on the evening of June 8. The crane fell the next afternoon, a Sunday, when winds of up to 77 mph roared through Dallas.
But engineering reports, forensic examination of the gnarled metal wreckage and photographic evidence say otherwise. In one fuzzy image taken during the storm and shown repeatedly to the jurors, two cranes are visible – the one that failed and one at a nearby construction site. The latter crane rotated in the wind and was undamaged. The one at the Greystar site is at an angle where it took the brunt of the wind’s force.
Hilty “made a mistake,” White said. “There’s no question – it wasn’t weathervaned.” But that didn’t make Greystar responsible for his error.
A critical issue at trial, and in a question the jury was charged to answer, was whether Hilty was an employee of Bigge or Greystar. “He can’t be an employee of both,” Judge Ballan instructed the jurors.
Under its lease agreement with Greystar, Bigge was to provide not only the crane but someone to operate it.
Bigge did – Robert Hilty. He was, at the time, on Bigge’s payroll. But the lease specified that the operator would be a “borrowed servant” – essentially, an employee on loan to Greystar as long as he was on the Dallas project. That, Barger said, made Greystar “fully liable for any and all loss or damage” he caused.
“There was no doubt that on the site, Mr. Hilty was under the control and supervision of Greystar,” he said.
White, however, noted that the judge’s instruction was to decide whose employee Hilty was “on the occasion in question.” That, he argued, didn’t mean for the duration of his time on the job. “On the occasion in question,” he said, meant June 8, 2019, the day before the collapse, when Hilty operated the crane for the last time. And on that day – Saturday – no one from Greystar was even on the site after 10 a.m. The only work going on that day was the disassembly and removal of a second Bigge crane that was no longer needed.
And Bigge was in charge of that dismantling.
“Greystar paid Bigge $86,000 for that one day’s work,” he said. “The only work done on June 8 was by Bigge.” And that, he said, means Hilty was working for Bigge.
In his deposition and trial testimony, Hilty gave conflicting answers, depending on which side was questioning him and how the questions were phrased
Although the Greystar defendants were typically referred to throughout the trial “Greystar,” they are, to be precise, three distinct business entities: Greystar Development & Construction LP; Gabriella Tower LLC and something called Greystar Development & Construction LP-Gabriella Nationwide Contractor Series.
Robert Faith, Greystar’s founder, chairman and CEO, testified in a deposition that scores of such companies had been created under the Greystar umbrella to finance, build, manage and own thousands of apartment projects in North America, South America, Asia and Europe.
Itkin, in his lawsuit, characterized the practice as “a shell game to avoid liability.”
“It’s all Greystar,” he said. “They just keep changing their hats.”
Greystar’s website says its property management arm oversees more than $35 billion in assets, while its in-house construction company has $16.5 billion in development projects under way.