An $8 Million Wayne County Verdict for a Volunteer Asphyxiated in a Moose Lodge Basement

The Northville Moose Lodge served fountain soda from a system pressurized by carbon dioxide tanks kept in the building's basement. The pump that ran that system was supposed to vent any escaping gas to the outside through a simple hose. It had been installed without that vent. When the system failed, an entire tank of carbon dioxide emptied into the closed basement. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it pooled in the low room and stayed there.

Mary Katherine Simpson, 48, volunteered at the lodge. She went down to the basement to change the soda syrup cartons connected to that pump. The gas is colorless and has no odor, and she had no way to know the room had filled with it. She was overcome before she could get back out. The loss of oxygen caused severe brain damage, and she died five days later, on October 12, 2014.

Her family brought a wrongful death suit in Wayne County Circuit Court in Detroit, naming the Northville Moose Lodge and Leonard's Syrups, the company tied to the soda equipment. Geoffrey Fieger tried the case for them. The center of it was the missing vent. A single hose, run to the outside, would have carried the escaping gas out of the building instead of trapping it in a basement where a volunteer was expected to work. Both defendants had a duty to make sure the gas could not collect where people were sent to do their jobs.

Police and Michigan's occupational safety agency, MIOSHA, had both investigated the death and traced it to the improperly installed pump. At trial, the jury heard how an ordinary chore, swapping out syrup cartons, turned fatal because of the way the equipment had been set up and left unvented. Fieger's case was that this was not a freak accident but a foreseeable result of skipping the one safety step the system was built around. The trial ran two weeks in the courtroom of Judge Patricia Perez Fresard.

On September 20, 2019, the jury deliberated for about two hours and returned a verdict of more than $8 million against the Northville Moose Lodge and Leonard's Syrups.