CHICAGO - A federal judge has dismissed a woman’s lawsuit against home improvement retailer Menards, accusing the company of negligence after she allegedly was injured when she tripped over 10-foot-long boards sticking out of a shopping cart.
U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis wrote in the order dismissing the claims filed by plaintiff Margarita Rosales that “because Menards did not have notice of the tripping hazard, Rosales cannot establish her negligence or premises liability claims.”
According to the opinion, Morales sued the company after she allegedly tripped over the boards at a Chicago Menards store. Rosales alleged she fell and hit her knees and hands.
U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis
| U.S. Courts
The plaintiff claimed Menards should have known that allowing customers to put lumber in regular shopping carts that weren’t long enough to safely accommodate the boards would create a tripping hazard.
Ellis said in her opinion “Menards may be liable if it had actual or constructive notice of the shopping cart with the protruding two-by-fours," but that employees who were working on the day of Rosales’s accident testified they routinely patrolled and monitored the store and no employee had any prior knowledge about the cart in question.
In addition, Ellis said Rosales essentially “urges a heightened standard of continuous monitoring and patrolling of a store’s safety conditions that [the Seventh Circuit] and Illinois courts have summarily rejected," stating that Rosales had not provided any evidence that there was a pattern of similar incidents or “that Menards’ policies placed Menards on constructive notice of the hazard at issue in this case.”
Ellis granted summary judgment to Menard and terminated the case.
Rosales is represented by attorneys Sheldon J. Aberman, Cary Jay Wintroub and Michael A. Hume, of the firm of Cary J. Wintroub & Associates, of Chicago.
Menards is represented by attorneys Laura E. Fahey and Nicole D. Milos, of Cremer, Spina, Shaughnessy, Jansen & Siegert LLC, of Chicago.