Demolition worker crushed by scaffolding at Aqueduct racetrack: $1.5 million settlement

Ricardo Sanclemente worked demolition at the Aqueduct racetrack in South Ozone Park, Queens, part of a crew taking down structures at the thoroughbred racing and casino complex. He belonged to Local 12A, the asbestos workers' union, whose members handle the hazardous teardown that comes before a building is leveled. On the job site, scaffolding came down on him. The New York Law Journal would later record the incident in flat, clinical language: a construction worker crushed by scaffolds.

Demolition ranks among the most dangerous work on any site. Old structures come apart in stages, and the tradesmen doing it move through half-dismantled floors while heavy machinery and temporary platforms crowd around them. A scaffold is meant to be the stable thing in that setting, something to stand on. When one collapses onto the worker it was supposed to hold, there is nowhere to step clear.

The defendants traced the project's chain of responsibility. The New York Racing Association owned the property. Tutor Perini Building Corp. and Navillus Tile handled construction. Genting New York, the casino operator at Aqueduct, along with Manafort Brothers and LVI Demolition Services, were also named, and the case branched into third-party claims against Reliance Restoration and an environmental subcontractor.

The Perecman Firm built the case on New York's scaffold law, Labor Law 240, which makes property owners and contractors responsible when a gravity-related hazard injures a worker and the site lacks the protection the statute requires. A platform that fails and falls on the person standing under it sits squarely inside that rule. David Perecman led the matter, with Adam M. Hurwitz on the file.

Instead of putting liability and damages to a Queens jury, the parties went to mediation. On March 26, 2020, they settled for $1.5 million. Because the case resolved by agreement rather than trial, there was no verdict to challenge and no reduction or remittitur on appeal.

The New York Law Journal included the result in its 2020 Top Verdicts and Settlements issue for the Northeast, naming it to the year's settlement list. It was one of eleven Perecman Firm recoveries named to the publication's New York roundup for that year.