Vista Jury Awards Chiropractor $7.5 Million After Starbucks Floor Slip and Brain Injury

In March 2008, Anthony Zaccaglin walked into a Starbucks on Melrose Avenue in Vista, California, to pick up a drink. A store manager had just mopped the tile floor. As Zaccaglin crossed from the register toward the pickup counter, he slipped and hit his head.

Zaccaglin, a working chiropractor, went to a doctor the next day with persistent headaches, nausea, and head pain. He was diagnosed with a concussion. Later examinations found mild traumatic brain injury that required more than a year of brain-injury therapy. Severe headaches, extreme fatigue, and medication side effects kept him from going back to the practice he ran. He and his wife filed suit the following year.

John Gomez and The Gomez Law Firm took the case to a jury in San Diego County Superior Court in Vista. One of the central fights was over warnings. The store manager testified that she had set out three cones around the wet area. Witnesses said they saw only one, and it was not positioned at the spot where Zaccaglin went down. An employee later apologized for not dry mopping after the wet pass, a second step that removes the film of water a wet mop leaves behind. Gomez argued that the company's safety policies were inadequate and applied inconsistently from store to store, and that the fall caused exactly the kind of head injury those rules existed to prevent.

The defense disputed how badly Zaccaglin was hurt and how the fall happened. Before trial, according to Gomez, Starbucks never offered more than $100,000 to settle the claim. Zaccaglin turned that down and went to verdict.

On December 23, 2011, the jury sided with the family. It awarded Zaccaglin $6,456,230.50 for losses that included lost income, medical expenses, and the loss of enjoyment of life, and awarded his wife, Lisa, $1 million for loss of consortium, bringing the total to about $7.5 million.

In a statement after the verdict, Starbucks said it had made every effort to reach a reasonable settlement and was reviewing the decision to determine what steps, if any, it might take. Public verdict records list the result as a $7.5 million plaintiff's verdict, with no reduction or remittitur noted.