Lawyers Defend Local Dad in Tragic Boat 'Flip.' Suit Seeks $30 Million-Plus
Sea-Doo Company Blames Father for Daughter's Brain Injury
Updated at 2:13 p.m.: This version correctly identifies which lawyer from the Goldberg & Rosen firm was being quoted and puts a dollar figure on the amount that will be sought by the lawsuit.
The father of the infant girl who nearly drowned when the family’s Sea-Doo Switch flipped on the St. Johns River is responsible for her injuries, the boat’s manufacturer has told a Florida judge.
Meanwhile, attorneys for the girl’s family conducted a news conference today near the scene of the August 25 accident. The place: Knights Landing boat ramp off Highway 17, where lawyers from the firm of Goldberg & Rosen shared publicly the arguments they have already put before the same Duval County judge.
Speaking to Clay News & Views ahead of the event, Attorney Judd Rosen said the girl’s “permanent neurological damage” was entirely the result of the boat’s flawed design. “Boats shouldn’t just flip ass over feet,” Rosen said.
Parents William Grullon and Sheila Feliciano are suing Bombadier Recreational Products and Jacksonville Power Sports, which sold the 13-foot pontoon craft to the couple early last year. In a lawsuit filed in a Duval County court, lawyers argued that the boat “suddenly and without warning flipped upside down” while approaching the Knights Landing boat ramp.
Their daughter Vianca, 16 months old at the time, suffered “a catastrophic anoxic brain injury” after being trapped beneath the overturned Switch for more than 10 minutes last August. According to the lawyers today, she has recently returned home, showing only slight signs of recovery.
In a lawsuit filed October 29, Grullon’s lawyers argued that the Sea-Doo Switch was “prone to suddenly flipping, overturning, losing buoyancy, water shifting in the pontoons and rendering it unstable and/or unsafe, and otherwise becoming unseaworthy.”
Switch have a tendency to nosedive when the boat decelerates suddenly, sometimes flipping over forward, according to owner accounts on Facebook.
Rosen said the girl’s lifetime care alone would cost more than $30 million. “You can't put a price tag on a baby girl's life, but we have the top experts that will estimate out exactly what she needs, best case scenarios to give her the best opportunities in life. That's a starting point,” Rosen said.
Rosen cited the 1970s litigation against Ford Motor Company because of the location of the gas tank on its Pinto compact car. “Depending upon the circumstances of the neglect and the circumstances of the defects in design and what Bombardier knew or didn't know, there's always an issue of punitive damages if they intentionally or with gross negligence allowed a known defective product on the market,” he said. “What was that car with the exploding trunk?”
Besides paying for their daughter’s medical care, the Grullon family wants Bombadier to take the Switch off the market until the design defects are corrected.
The reference in the Grullon lawsuit to “water shifting in the pontoons” is an unproven theory advanced by Clay News & Views in news coverage of the accident.
Switch is a pontoon-type craft whose outer two hulls have multiple segments whose number determines length overall. That is, whether a model is 13, 16 or 19 feet long. The segments are purposely not sealed, so water seeps into the hulls, supposedly to add weight and thus stability at rest. The ballast water then flows out through an opening or openings in the back when underway or when hauled out. There are also drain plugs.
It is also not known whether the hulls incorporate “baffles,” interior barriers that suppress the movement of water. The question is whether the design of the Switch would allow water to rush forward during a slowdown and help bury the nose of the boat, causing it to trip.
“We've already retained all the experts naval architects and an entire team of experts to take the vessel apart, dissect every piece of the of the incident and find out exactly what happened,” Rosen said. “We'll know more about the circumstances as the case goes on, especially when the defendant has to turn over all their design documents and their testing documents.”
In its response to the lawsuit filed last month, Bombadier defended the Switch as seaworthy and turned the blame back on William Grullon, saying the girl’s father “so carelessly and negligently conducted himself as to cause the accident alleged and/or the resulting injuries and damages, and such carelessness and negligence proximately caused the accident, injuries and damages alleged in the complaint, thus barring or proportionately reducing any claim for damages against BRP.”
Under Florida liability law, courts hearing injury cases can assign percentages of blame for an accident to more than one actor. In this case, Bombadier lawyers will try to prove that Grullon should bear most or all of the blame and thus most of the burden for paying his daughter’s medical bills and any compensation for suffering.
Investigators for Florida Fish & Wildlife have concluded that the manufacturer-recommended capacity of 825 pounds had been exceeded by the five adults and their gear—coolers, etc.—plus whatever the weight of the infant girl. Another contributing factor was Grullon’s inexperience as a boater.
Rosen said their position is that the boat was not over-capacity on the day of the accident, nor was Grullon, despite his inexperience, operating the vessel inappropriately. Even if the boat were overloaded, the fact that most of the people were grouped at the rear of the vessel should have made the Switch more difficult to flip “ass over front,” Rosen said.
Bombadier’s attempt to blame the father was wrong on another level, the lawyer said. Rosen argued that Bombadier had taken the concept of a pontoon boat, made it speedy “like a Ferrari on the water,” priced it cheaper than conventional watercraft and marketed it to inexperienced wannabe boaters like the Grullon family, all the while refusing to assume any responsibility when things went tragically wrong.