Overgrown Vegetation Led to $5 Million Verdict, $2 Million+ Final Judgment, in Crash

with Scott Henratty

A 12-year-old boy riding an e-bike suffered severe injuries after colliding head-first with a car exiting a South Florida apartment complex. The driver couldn’t see him approaching the sidewalk because overgrown vegetation obstructed her view.
Morgan & Morgan attorney Scott Henratty argued that the apartment complex failed to adhere to local safety requirements regarding landscaping, designed to preserve visibility for drivers and pedestrians.
The jury assigned 40% fault to the apartment complex, 40% to the boy's mother, and 20% to the boy. The pre-trial offer of $100,000 wasn’t enough to cover medical expenses — after the fault allocation, the verdict was over $5 million and the final judgment was just over $2 million.
Here Henratty discusses using engineering experts and digital mapping to establish how overgrown landscaping obstructed the driver's line of sight, identifying a premises liability claim in a case that initially appeared to be an e-bike collision and presenting complex technical evidence.

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