Perkins v. The Val D'Aosta Company

A factual question remained as to whether the hazard precipitating the plaintiff's fall was readily discernible to him in his exercise of ordinary care and, thus, whether his knowledge of it can be presumed

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Morrell K. and Doris Perkins filed suit against The Val D’Aosta Company arising out of a slip and fall incident involving Morrell Perkins on March 24, 2006. The Perkinses appeal from the trial court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the Company. For the reasons set forth below, we reverse. “On appeal from a grant of summary judgment, we conduct a de novo review of the evidence to determine if there exists a genuine issue of material fact and whether the undisputed facts, viewed in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party, entitle the movant to judgment as a matter of law.” Punctuation omitted. Bone v. The Children’s Place , 297 Ga. App. 367 677 SE2d 404 2009.

So viewed, the evidence shows that the Company owns and operates the Comfort Inn in Valdosta, Georgia. On or around March 21, 2006, Morrell Perkins checked into the Comfort Inn for a two-to-three-day stay, along with his wife Doris, and his daughter, Jeanette Graves. On March 24, after checking out of the hotel, Perkins descended the hotel stairs from his second-floor room with his “little attache case” in his hand and turned left toward the parking lot, walking along the porch of the hotel. He then stepped off a curb1 from the porch to the parking lot. Perkins described the curb as “just a regular curb, seven or eight inches high.” He said that he just stepped off the curb and fell into the bushes and onto some bricks, breaking his ankle. He said that he did not see the curb. Doris Perkins was behind her husband at the time, and she said the drop from the porch to the landing was “maybe two or three inches taller than the normal step down.” She said, “he just stepped down off of that tall thing, and it threw him and he fell over into the shrubbery on the left.”

Perkins v. The Val D'Aosta Company

A factual question remained as to whether the hazard precipitating the plaintiff's fall was readily discernible to him in his exercise of ordinary care and, thus, whether his knowledge of it can be presumed

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