So I was watching The People's Court as I often do during lunch and today they had a pretty interesting case.
This lady lives in a 65+ year old apartment building that has four units and it's, well, just plain old. Since it's old she only has a single outlet and a single window in her bedroom and it apparently gets pretty hot in there. Since she only has a single window, she doesn't want to place an in-window AC unit so she decides she wants a 4ft AC unit that she can place in her bedroom. In order to power this, she must have two 6 outlet surge protectors plugged into her single bedroom outlet. She also has these surge protectors filled with others (can people guess where this story is going?).
Also, this lady says she has been complaining of faulty wiring for the 4 or so years she has lived there and also directly to the new landlord who has had the place for about a year and a half.
So on the 3rd night of having the 4ft AC Unit sitting in her bedroom she wakes up and smells smoke. She immediately gets up, leaves her apartment, leaves her door open, runs past the fire extinguisher in the hallway, and runs upstairs to one of the neighbors she knows and bangs on his door. He had his headphones on apparently and didn't hear her so what does this lady do?
she runs back into her apartment, notices the AC unit is in fact on fire, grabs one of her two cats, runs out, leaves her door open still, runs past the fire extinguisher again, runs across the street, and calls everybody but fire department. She doesn't alert any other neighbors, she doesn't close her door to contain the fire, and she doesn't bother calling the fire department.
So her nearest neighbor eventually smells the smoke. She tries to go to the door to leave the apartment but just being near the door gives her burns since there is a raging inferno outside her door. She calls the fire department, the power goes out, she then grabs her cat, jumps out the window and then starts rescuing the elderly upstairs neighbors and alerting the guy with headphones (mind you none of them could go out their door because they would instantly die). Thanks to this lady the only casualties were pets.
So now onto the court case!
The lady is suing the landlord because it's obviously his fault because the apartments had faulty wiring. She just completely ignores all these facts:
- In order to buy the complex in the first place, he had to have an inspection and pass the inspection. The landlord didn't have that with him but the judge trusted him on that one since it did make sense.
- Her lease (which she brought and submitted) stated that there shall be no portable AC (window or otherwise) units installed without the landlords direct approval which she did not have.
- The instruction manual for the AC unit (which she provided) directly stated do not plug the unit into a surge protector with other things because it will catch fire.
- By her own testimony, she had both surge protectors filled with stuff including the AC unit going into the single wall outlet.
- The fire report (which she brought and submitted) clearly states that the fire was started and caused by the AC unit
So everything she herself submitted completely killed her case, the landlord didn't even have to be there, but she still insisted that it was faulty wiring. She had hearsay from an electrician or even a phone number from a fire marshal which could help her cause but somehow those people weren't there and couldn't testify.
Even after the case when the judge spent a good 5 minutes yelling at her she still felt no remorse for the people she could have killed and still insisted that absolutely none of the blame was on her, it was all the landlord. She completely ignored the fact that if someone had died in that fire she would have been charged with manslaughter.
It's just sickening at how absolutely stupid that lady is.
