Bleacher feature: COA revives baseball fan's lawsuit.

Byline: David Donovan

Newman Park, on the campus of Catawba College, would make an ideal backdrop for a movie about old-time baseball. The grandstand still has the same wooden bleachers it had when it was erected in 1934or at least many of them, anyway. A few were removed after a woman seriously injured herself during a game, and the school's decision to destroy such a potentially crucial piece of evidence helped prompt the North Carolina Court of Appeals to overturn a lower court's ruling and reinstate the woman's lawsuit against the college.

Starr Shepard was at Newman Park to watch her son pitch for Catawba in 2016 when she rose from her usual seat in the bleachers and suddenly fell, tumbling down the bleachers and landing on the pavement, breaking her back as her head went into a fence. Shepard said that immediately before she fell, she'd felt her foot get trapped under a wooden slat, but she was rushed to the hospital before anyone could pinpoint exactly where she had tripped.

Shepard retained counsel, which asked the college to let its expert witness inspect the stadium and warned it against altering the ballpark's condition beforehand. Nevertheless, the expert arrived to find workers dissembling the part of the bleachers where the fall occurred. After inspecting the rest of the stadium, the expert concluded that the "relic" was in disrepair, had been severely neglected for many years, and "should have been condemned many years ago," and the repairs underway evidenced the school's knowledge of this.

Shepard sued the college, alleging that it had been negligent in maintaining the bleachers. The school moved for summary judgment, arguing that Shepard's inability to identify the exact place where she fell and the condition of the exact board at issue precluded her from proving either that the college had notice of a defective condition or that a defect had caused her fall. In 2018 Mecklenburg County Superior Court Judge Adam M. Conrad granted the school's motion.

But Judge Donna Stroud, writing for a unanimous Court of Appeal in a Feb. 18 opinion, reversed that ruling, concluding that Shepard had presented enough evidence to send the case to a jury. The fact that the bleachers were more than 80 years old and used frequently was sufficient evidence that the college knew, or should have known in the exercise of reasonable care, of the dangerous conditions created by their allegedly rotting and decaying wood, Stroud wrote.

"Plaintiff's...