HARTFORD, Conn. (Legal Newsline) - A Connecticut town can drag a property owner and others into a lawsuit over a child’s drowning in a backyard pool, rejecting the plaintiff’s attempt to blame the entire event on the town’s failure to enforce municipal safety codes.
Malisa Costanzo sued the town of Plainfield after her daughter Isabella drowned in an aboveground pool at the house she was renting. Costanzo claimed the town issued a building permit for the pool, but inspectors never came back to make sure it had a self-locking gate and pool alarm.
Plainfield moved for apportionment, or the right to add other defendants including the property owner and prior tenants who installed the pool. The town said the former tenants filed the pool permit but never called the town for final inspection after it was built, as required by law.
The trial judge refused the request for apportionment, but an appeals court reversed, citing a state law that allows defendants to bring in other parties in negligence lawsuits.
The Connecticut Supreme Court upheld the reversal in a decision published July 19. Despite her efforts to keep the other defendants out of her lawsuit, the state high court ruled in a decision by Justice Raheem Mullins, Plainfield had the right to pull them in.
The decision hinged on a statute creating two exceptions to the general rule protecting municipalities from liability. One exception is for the failure to properly inspect a building, when the town has notice of a safety violation. The other is when the town acts with “a reckless disregard for health or safety.”
Costanzo argued the law doesn’t allow apportionment unless the claim is “substantially similar to common-law negligence” and that the two exceptions didn’t fit that definition. But the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that the first exception excludes recklessness, a key dividing line between ordinary negligence and more serious causes of liability.
Plainfield argued others were more to blame for the child’s drowning, including the property owner, who rented the house to Costanzo knowing the pool had never passed final inspection and the tenant had five young children. Costanzo also filed bystander emotional distress claims on behalf of her surviving children that were not the subject of this appeal.