Federal appeals court reinstates lawsuit over Columbia’s Allen Benedict Court gas leak death
A federal appeals court has reversed a judge’s ruling and reinstated a lawsuit against the Columbia Housing Authority over a tenant’s 2019 death at Allen Benedict Court public housing complex.
Danielle Washington filed the lawsuit after her father, Calvin Witherspoon Jr., died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the former public housing complex that was later found to be missing carbon monoxide detectors in its units. A second tenant, Derrick Roper, also died from the January 2019 gas leak, which led to all 206 housing units being evacuated. The Housing Authority demolished the 80-year-old housing complex in 2021.
But Columbia Housing Authority attorney Charles Turner successfully argued in federal district court that Washington’s lawsuit should be dismissed. Judge Joseph Anderson ruled in favor of the Housing Authority in 2021, saying the allegations in the lawsuit didn’t rise to a constitutional violation. But plaintiff’s attorney Richard Hricik appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, and on Thursday, the appeals court overruled Anderson’s finding.
Writing for the three-judge panel, Fourth Circuit Judge James Wynn ruled that Witherspoon’s death was a result of “deliberate indifference.”
“Unlike cases involving emergency, split-second decisions, Plaintiff alleges years of choices by the Housing Authority that led to the tragic circumstances of this case,” the court ruled, finding that the Housing Authority would have received multiple complaints about conditions at Allen Benedict Court during the seven years Witherspoon lived there. “Yet the Housing Authority chose not to respond to these complaints, or at most took only half-measures to resolve them,” the court said.
During that time, the court found that the Columbia Housing Authority adopted policies to replace carbon monoxide detectors in privately-owned homes but had failed to apply the same standard to properties the Housing Authority owned itself, such as Allen Benedict Court.
“By affirmatively adopting regulations recognizing the life-threatening danger of missing carbon monoxide detectors, the Housing Authority demonstrated that it knew the risk of harm that Witherspoon faced,” the court ruled.
The Housing Authority had argued it couldn’t be held that Witherspoon’s death was a foreseeable occurrence without a prior carbon monoxide incident occurring at Allen Benedict Court. “Taken to its logical conclusion, the Housing Authority’s argument would amount to a ‘one free death’ card,” the court ruled.
The ruling sends the case back to district court in South Carolina for further proceedings. The Housing Authority also faces at least seven lawsuits in state court brought by former Allen Benedict Court residents or their families.
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