Brown & Crouppen Recovers $200,000 for a Cyclist Hurt at a St. Louis Plumbing Work Site

In the dark hours before dawn, Joshua Klenke was riding his bicycle through St. Louis when his front wheel dropped into a rock-filled depression in the road. He was 26. The dip sat where a steel plate had covered an excavation for underground plumbing work. The plate had already been pulled, but city crews had not yet poured new pavement to close the gap.

Klenke went down hard. He fractured his collarbone, an injury that required surgery to set and stabilize the broken bone. A predawn ride that should have been routine instead left him with a surgical repair and a long recovery from a single dip in the pavement.

The work that created the hazard traced back to a city contract. The City of St. Louis had hired Sutter Plumbing Company to shut off a pipe connection beneath the street. Klenke sued both the city and Sutter, filing his case in St. Louis Circuit Court on July 31, 2018, under case number 1722-CC01408. David Ahlheim and Craig Klotz of Childress Ahlheim Cary handled the defense.

James Cantalin and Bradley Elkin of Brown & Crouppen represented Klenke, and the liability picture was not simple. There were no photographs of the defect, which Cantalin called the weak point of the case: "The negative to my case was that I didn't have any photographs of the defect." His team first looked hard at Sutter, then changed course. They concluded the plumbing company had done what it was supposed to do, and that the city bore responsibility, because Klenke hit the depression after the plate came off but before city workers replaced the pavement.

The city pushed back, taking the position that the depression was not a defect at all. Even so, the two sides reached a $200,000 settlement.

The money did not come out of the city's budget. It came from Federated Mutual Insurance Company, Sutter Plumbing's insurer, because Sutter's contract had agreed to indemnify the city against any damages from the project. The case resolved by agreement rather than a jury verdict, so the figure was not subject to remittitur or reduction on appeal.