PORT ST. JOE — A Gulf County jury last week awarded a Port St. Joe woman over $6 million due to injuries suffered while working at a now-closed restaurant.
Whether Evelyn Holland receives a dime remains an open question, despite a life her attorney said has been relegated to a wheelchair due to disabling injuries to her pelvis and spine.
What further made the case of Holland against Gracie O’Malley’s Restaurant one for the books was that the defense was a no-show: no defendant, no defense attorney, nobody on one side of the courtroom during last week’s trial. A jury of six awarded Holland the $6 million after a trial that consumed, from opening statement to verdict, roughly six hours and which included no cross-examinations, motions or witnesses for the defense.
“I told the jury, I am a board-certified attorney and Judge (John) Fishel is a board-certified attorney and neither one of us has done this before,” said Holland’s attorney, Randy Thompson, from the firm of Kerrigan, Estes, Rankin & McLeod.
He was stunned about the “completely empty” defense table in the courtroom
“So what you do is you follow the rules,” he continued. “I picked the jury, I had witnesses and I put on my case. By the time I made my closing argument, it was about 10 minutes long because it was a big concern that the jury might get tired of hearing me.”
Thompson said he pushed the case to a jury trial, despite the lack of a defense, because he wanted to send a message to the former owner of Gracie O’Malley’s, Dr. Noel Cotterman Mackay, and to the community.
“I want the community to understand she was treated wrongly and Dr. Mackay cannot thumb his nose at the process,” Thompson said.
The case spans from March 2013, when Holland, an employee of Gracie O’Malley’s, slipped and fell due to water leaking from the kitchen dishwasher, the complaint she filed detailed. Holland, described by her neighbor during trial as “a hard-working woman and now just sitting in her wheelchair,” broke both bones in her pelvis and suffered a compression fracture of a thoracic vertebrae.
Holland, 71, was hospitalized for three weeks and medical testimony during the trial demonstrated she will be largely confined to a wheelchair the rest of her life and require ongoing treatment for her injuries.
Her misfortune was compounded by the fact that Gracie O’Malley’s carried no worker’s compensation insurance. Under Florida law, a business that does not carry worker’s compensation can be sued.
Additionally, the defendant in that suit cannot use the concept of “comparable fault,” which means that the victim’s actions in some way contributed to the accident. Effectively, it renders the case on similar grounds as worker’s compensation claims.
“I went into this knowing there was no insurance, but I thought at some point the guy would put something in Ms. Holland’s pocket,” Thompson said.
Holland said on the stand that Mackay visited her one time in the hospital and advised her she needed to “get out of bed and go home because the hospital was costing” him money. He has paid none of her medical bills, she testified.
Mackay passed the civil complaint onto his general liability insurance carrier. After contracting with a Jacksonville attorney, the carrier was excused from the case because the general liability policy did not cover employees, only the business and its customers. That is what a worker’s compensation insurance is for.
Mackay hired a law firm out of Panama City, but that firm withdrew from the case late last year, informing the court it could not act due to the lack of a cooperation from Mackay.
Thompson filed to depose Mackay, and the deposition was set for January. But Mackay sent Thompson a handwritten letter that arrived the day before the deposition was to take place. In it he explained he was leaving for his home in South America, would not be back until December, and was sorry about how things had played out.
The last three entries of the court docket in the case are notations of mail returned from Mackay.
Attempts to contact Mackay for this story were unsuccessful.
During trial, Thompson posed a simple question to the jury after presenting his witnesses.
“If your life is punctuated by a wheelchair and go from doing anything you wanted to do … to sitting in a wheelchair because it is all you can do, what is the cost?” he said. “I wanted them to put a value on your life being changed due to a mistake, in this case, intentional.”
He asked the jury to award Holland the wages she would have earned, at the $10.50 per hour she made at Gracie O’Malley’s, from March 2013 to this month, as well as potential future earnings that were lost. Past earnings amounted to $42,000.
Holland stated she hoped to work nine more years, to the age of 80. He asked for nine years future earnings. The jury award of $126,000 was above that amount.
He asked the jury to award money to cover medical expenses to date, $77,355.27, as well as the estimated expenses for the future. The jury did, adding in $136,000 in future medical bills.
And, putting value to a life changed, to pay for pain and suffering, Thompson argued that $1,000 per day, to live with broken bones in hip and back, was insufficient. For past pain and suffering the jury awarded $750,000.
Holland’s life expectancy was 14.6 years, Thompson contended.
The jury awarded Holland $1,000 per day for 14.6 years, or $5.11 million for future pain and suffering. The total award was $6,241,355.27.