Pedicab fall nets $1M

By ADAM LINHARDT Citizen Staff

A Key West pedicab company will not get a chance to plead its case again after a jury awarded nearly $1 million to a 52-year-old St. Petersburg woman who claimed a spill from a trike left her with brain injuries.

Perfect Pedicab Inc.'s motion for a new trial was denied by a Monroe County circuit court judge.

Now the company must pay Phyllis Smith $927,924 the jury awarded her in October, about $200,000 of which was for her pain and suffering.

Smith claims she scraped her head on the concrete, leaving her with headaches, trouble sleeping and a litany of other mental health issues that have forced her to withdraw from her normal routine, court records say.

"I can't explain what was in the minds of the jurors," said the company's attorney, Christopher Fertig. "It was the position of my client that [Smith] was not as injured as she claimed and did not suffer any permanent injury from the fall. It was not a complex case."

The crash occurred on March 22, 2004, when Smith was in town for a wedding. She and other guests were taking two pedicabs from their hotel to a rehearsal dinner when the drivers began to race. Fertig blamed Smith for egging them on, telling them they wouldn't get paid if they didn't oblige.

They collided and overturned, but Fertig said Smith sustained only minor injuries and presented evidence to suggest she displayed similar symptoms of mental injury before the wreck, records say.

"A surveillance film from a nearby business that captured the accident was presented to jurors," Fertig said. "In that footage she appears to be acting normally, but the jury felt otherwise."

Fertig's motion for a new trial also complained that one of the plaintiff's witnesses, a doctor, acted inappropriately on the stand when he used an encapsulated plastic brain for a demonstration and "caused the brain to suddenly leak and seep a red, viscous material reflecting a bleeding or hemorrhaging brain," court records say.

Though the company has insurance to cover the settlement, Fertig said, he argued that it should not be responsible, as the drivers were independent contractors not under the control of Perfect Pedicab Inc.

Circuit Judge David Audlin denied the motion on April 18.

Smith could not be reached for comment and a receptionist for her attorney, Aubrey O'Dicus Jr., said he had no comment after he declined to return repeated phone calls to his St. Petersburg office.

alinhardt@keysnews.com