mom perches baby on ledge to take pic, baby falls to death, mom suing Staples Center

[Jim Lane]

42. It's not clear that SHE changed her story.

Your linked article refers to "initial reports from the accident scene," which suggests to me that the reports were from bystanders rather than being her "official" story.

On the version of the accident that you cite, she probably has at least a colorable case. If she didn't deliberately put the kid in danger, but merely lost track of him momentarily, and if the protective partition was so low that a two-year-old could crawl over it, that sounds like negligence on the part of the Staples Center. It's foreseeable that, every now and then, a toddler will be crawling around unsupervised, for one reason or another, so the facility owner should exercise reasonable care to protect against a fall of this sort.

Of course, Staples can argue in defense that the mother was negligent in losing track of the kid. There are many accidents that occur because of more than one party's negligence. I don't know California law on comparative negligence, but it would probably be up to a jury to allocate the culpability, by assigning a percentage to each party and making sure the percentages add up to 100. In general, in a case like this, even parental negligence wouldn't be a superseding cause that would get the Staples Center off the hook.

If she deliberately put the kid on the ledge, she obviously has a much tougher case. Staples Center must exercise reasonable care but isn't a guarantor of everyone's safety. There's no system that's completely idiot-proof. Nevertheless, the mother might still have a chance if, for example, the Building Code requires that there be netting under luxury boxes, and there wasn't.