$5 Million Settlement for a Drywall Installer Paralyzed in a Fall Through a Subfloor

On December 6, 2018, a drywall installer was working inside a home that was under construction. To move material into the basement, someone had cut a hole in the subfloor and used it as a delivery chute. Earlier in the job the developer had placed a barrier in front of the opening. By the day of the accident the barrier was gone, and sheets of drywall had been laid flat across the floor, covering the gap.

The installer did not know the hole was there. As he bent down and lifted a stack of the drywall sheets, the floor under him gave way and he dropped to the level below.

The fall broke his spine. He suffered a burst fracture at the T12 vertebra, the lowest segment of the thoracic spine. Surgeons stabilized the injury with hardware and a fusion that ran from T10 down to L2. He was left with incomplete paraplegia in both legs and a neurogenic bladder, the kind of permanent loss that ends a career built on physical labor.

Brett Coppage of Edelman & Thompson in Kansas City represented him. The suit, filed in Jackson County Circuit Court at Independence, named two defendants: the developer of the project and the company that delivered the drywall. The central question was who had removed the barrier and laid the sheets over the open hole, and each side pointed at the other. That dispute over responsibility was never put to a jury.

To build the damages case, the plaintiff's team relied on a construction-code expert, Frank Morris, along with a vocational expert, a life-care planner (Dr. Roger Huckfeldt), and an economist (Kurt Krueger) who put figures to the lost earnings and the lifetime cost of care. The defense countered with its own construction-code expert, Jim Lambie.

The parties settled on February 14, 2023, before the case reached trial. The total recovery was $5 million: $1 million paid by the developer and $4 million paid by the drywall delivery company. Missouri Lawyers Media later ranked the result No. 42 among the state's top verdicts and settlements for 2023.