ST. LOUIS — A federal judge refused to dismiss a scooter user’s personal injury lawsuit against utility companies.
U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey denied the dismissal notion on April 23 by defendants MasTec North American and AT&T Missouri.
Nancy Lueders filed suit against the defendants in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.
The plaintiff, who is a quadriplegic, sued the defendants after falling from her scooter. Lueders' claim alleged her scooter overturned when it struck a cable box inside a loose gravel-filled sidewalk block in St. Louis in June 2018.
She said the fall, which dumped her into the street, resulted in permanent injuries and caused financial harm. She was a quadriplegic before the incident and “was carefully and cautiously utilizing the sidewalk” before the fall, according to court documents.
MasTec completed the excavation work at the site near 212 N. Kirkwood Road, St. Louis, to expose the AT&T box in question. The city of Kirkwood Department of Public Services issued a permit for the project.
The defendants asked Judge Autrey to dismiss Lueders’ request for punitive damages. They argued the allegations in her “first amended complaint, taken as true, do not rise to the level required to award punitive damages,” Judge Autrey's order said.
He said a claim for punitive damages has to be brought along with a claim for actual damages, which means the companies can’t use the punitive damage request as grounds for dismissing the entire complaint.
Quoting a 2016 opinion in Hurley v. Smithway Motor Express, also in the Eastern District of Missouri, Judge Autrey wrote “In Missouri, punitive damages do not and cannot exist as an independent cause of action; they are mere incidents to the cause of action and can never constitute the basis thereof.”
Since punitive damages aren’t an individual claim, Judge Autrey concluded, they are not subject to motions to dismiss, but would properly be proved during a trial. And since the defendants’ motion to dismiss don’t touch on any of Leuders’ underlying causes of action, that motion must be denied.