BROOKLYN, N.Y. (Legal Newsline) - The widow of a man who parked his car on the George Washington Bridge, scaled a barrier onto a locked walkway and plunged to his death can sue the New York Port Authority for failing to maintain the bridge in a “reasonably safe condition,” an appeals court has ruled, reversing a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit.
The decision hinged upon the murky boundary between a government’s liability for “governmental” versus “proprietary” functions. Rejecting a dissent by two of the five judges on the panel, a majority of New York’s Second Court of Appeal ruled that the Port Authority was subject to the same liberal standard of negligence as an ordinary property owner over claims stemming from the design and operation of the bridge.
The dissenters, led by judge Reinaldo Rivera, said the case should have been dismissed because the Port Authority, in its governmental role, owed no special duty to prevent drivers from committing suicide. Government liability for suicide is typically limited to institutions like jails and mental hospitals in which employees have special responsibility to prevent people from killing themselves, the dissenters said.
On Jan. 28, 2016, Vladimir Perlov drove onto the bridge and stopped his vehicle in a multi-lane freeway, climbed over a barrier and made his way to a walkway that was secured from pedestrian access by locked gates. He hurled himself into the Hudson River and was killed.
His widow, Eugena Perlov, sued the Port Authority, claiming it was negligent for failing to install suicide-prevention barriers despite being aware of the "extraordinary number of suicides attempted at the location."
A trial court granted the Port Authority summary dismissal, finding the case failed to state a claim. But the three-judge majority on the appeals court rejected that reasoning, citing a 2016 decision by New York’s highest court upholding a multimillion-dollar verdict for parents who blamed their child’s injury by a speeding car on the City of New York’s failure to install traffic control measures on the street.
“Neither the Port Authority nor the dissent have delineated a difference between the planning, design, and maintenance of a roadway and that of the bridge at issue here,” the majority ruled.
The dissenters said preventing suicide on the bridge was more of a police function, subject to the same limits on lawsuits.
The Port Authority was justified in arguing “it generally was not responsible for allegedly failing to take certain security measures to prevent harm to an individual, such as the decedent, who had exited from his car onto a busy multi-lane roadway, scaled a barrier from the roadway onto a pedestrian walkway that was closed off to all pedestrians by a set of tall locked fences, and jumped over the railing to his death,” the dissenters wrote.