Lincoln Park Porch Collapse: $16.6 Million for 13 Killed and Dozens Hurt

It was just after 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 29, 2003, and dozens of guests had spilled onto the back porches of a three-flat at 713 West Wrightwood Avenue in Chicago's Lincoln Park. The party filled all three levels of the rear wooden structure. The top deck gave way, pancaking onto the porch below it, and the wreckage carried the crowd down into a basement pit.

Thirteen people, most of them in their twenties, were killed. More than 50 others were hurt, some of them badly. It remains the worst porch collapse in the city's history.

Investigators found that the porch never should have failed under the weight of a crowd. It had been built bigger than the city code allowed, without permits, with undersized flooring and fasteners too small for the load. An architect retained in the litigation concluded that the structure would have held had it been put together according to code. City inspectors had issued no citations before the night it came down. The property owner, Philip Pappas, was later fined $108,000, and the porch contractor, Restoration Specialists LLC, was fined $25,000.

Roughly 40 lawsuits were consolidated in Cook County Circuit Court against Pappas, his company LG Properties, and Restoration Specialists. Francis Patrick Murphy of Corboy & Demetrio represented 14 of the victims and their families, the largest group handled by any single firm in the case. The city was found immune from liability, which left the available insurance as the pool the families were fighting over.

The defendants agreed to a global settlement of $16.6 million, the full limit of the coverage in place. The money came in layers: a $1 million primary policy, $15 million from an excess carrier, and $600,000 from the building owner himself.

Because the case resolved by settlement rather than a jury verdict, there was no award for a court to cut or remit. The one appeal that followed ran the other way. A group of plaintiffs argued the primary insurer owed $2 million instead of $1 million, which would have raised the total payout. An Illinois appeals court rejected that reading in 2013, leaving the $16.6 million intact roughly ten years after the collapse.