Elderly Funeral Guest Suffers Brain and Facial Fractures in Staircase Fall at Private Club

An 80-year-old woman and her husband arrived at a private club in Virginia for a funeral reception. To reach the outdoor courtyard, she descended an exterior staircase. At or near the top step, she lost her balance and fell, cascading down nearly the full length of the stairs.

The fall left her with a traumatic brain injury, skull fractures, facial fractures, and a shoulder fracture. Extensive hospitalization followed, and physicians documented permanent sequelae. Special damages totaled $766,831.50.

The case presented an immediate evidentiary obstacle: post-traumatic amnesia wiped out the client's memory of the actual fall, and no eyewitness saw her go down. Ward Marstiller and Christopher Spinelli of Emroch and Kilduff in Richmond turned to the physical evidence. They retained construction experts who measured the staircase and found that the top riser and tread were shorter than every other step on the flight, a dimensional defect that violated multiple building codes. The deviation created a predictable stumble point for anyone descending from that first step.

The firm pursued two defendants: the contractor who built the stairs during a courtyard renovation project in the years before the incident, and the club owner for failing to correct or warn about a hazard that inspection would have revealed. Depositions of contractor personnel and club staff corroborated the staircase measurements and supported the theory that the defect had existed, uncorrected, since construction.

The parties reached a $2.3 million settlement on July 19, 2024, through mediation conducted by Judge Thomas S. Shadrick (Ret.).