Lawsuits filed after young boys die in separate garage gate accidents – WESH 2 Orlando

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Right now, lawsuits are in the works after two young boys lost their lives to automated gates opening.
Automated gates have lots of requirements to stop accidents as they close, but experts told WESH 2 that there are little to no requirements to stop accidents as they open.
Automated gates are meant to make our lives fast, easy, and safe.
But Charkia Summers knows those gates are powerful enough to take lives too.
“I hope no other kid goes through, or no other family, has to go through the same situation because it’s senseless,” Summers said.
In June 2020, Summers’s 7-year-old nephew Dedric “D.T.” Holt and his younger cousins wandered from a playground to an automated gate at an apartment complex’s garage.
According to Summers’s legal complaint, the garage door had open see-through bars and Dedric was standing on the garage door holding onto the door bars with his hands.
The complaint says the other kids with him began to switch the garage door on and off.
Her attorneys say that the gate rolled up with Dedric’s small head and body caught, tangled, and crushed in inside.
“He ended up staying on life support from June 11 until July 1 of 2020. He had severe anoxic brain damage. We just waited and prayed and hoped that he came out of it. And he didn’t. And we didn’t want him to suffer anymore,” Summers said.
Summers’ family had to bury their little boy but filed a lawsuit against the company that sold the garage gate.
“All I wanted was for this to never happen again to another family,” Summers said.
But less than a year later, 6-year-old Jacob Alexander Joseph got trapped in an apartment garage gate in Orlando.
“We had people sending it to us like, ‘Oh, my God, this happened again?’ Like, ‘Do you see this?’ and I’m just like heartbroken, like completely heartbroken,” Summers said.
In a lawsuit filed on Jacob’s family’s behalf, attorneys say at the apartment complex where he lived, Jacob stepped and held onto the bottom of the garage door’s automated curtain.
But his family’s attorneys say Jacob was still on when the gate started to roll open.
Lawyers say no audible alarms went off and no sensors shut the gate down.
It kept rolling up with Jacob’s body caught.
A witness told WESH 2 News at the time, he and others tried desperately to reach Jacob until first responders arrived.
“I’m going to go through this for a while. It comes and goes. I’ve seen some stuff, but this was a 6-year-old kid,” Douglas Skogland, a witness, said.
Once emergency personnel got Jacob down and rushed him to the hospital, he was placed on life support.
But just like Dedric, Jacob did not survive.
“It broke my heart to know that it happened again to another family,” Summers said.
Brenton Cheney says organizations like the International Door Association, of which he is president, help create standards to prevent tragedies like these.
Cheney says every gate is required to have one fail-safe way to stop accidents as it closes.
That could mean sensors that would stop the gate from closing on anything or anyone below.
“And that would either be a set of photo eyes down at the bottom, which is an infrared beam that goes across the bottom of the opening,” Cheney said.
Or the entrapment prevention could be a reversing edge system.
“Where it would actually come down, come in contact with something, stops the door, and then runs the door back open,” Cheney said.
But Cheney says there are no additional requirements to stop entrapment as the gate rolls up, which is what happened in both cases.
Cheney says the access controls are required to be mounted at a certain height so kids can’t touch them and at a specific distance away from the gate, so you can’t be in contact with both at the same time.
“What happens is they put their arm through the gate, and then the gate opens, and then they can’t get their arm back out, either quick enough, or it gets caught,” Cheney said.
In Dedric’s case, Summers argues in legal filings the gate company’s employee failed to properly install the control switch at the recommended height.
But Cheney says there is generally no requirement for a sensor on the opening cycle.
Cheney says it’s likely just because more people are hurt when a gate closes on them.
But he says the technology is out there.
“There are a number of currently available safety devices that could fairly easily be adapted to take care of the safety features in an open position and open cycle. And many manufacturers already offer those. It’s just not a requirement.”
“We won’t be the first, second, or the last people, if they don’t put some kind of safety, some kind of safety tools in place,” Summers said.
“I definitely think that additional safety features in the future will probably be had,” Cheney said.
Those who lost a child told us that they hope they can at least see a safer future for other families soon.
“I just want to let the family in Orlando know that we are still thinking about them and praying for them. And we’re hoping to get some safety measures put in place after all of this,” Summers said.
In the Tennessee case, the company involved with the garage door sales filed a motion to dismiss the case.
A judge has not yet ruled.
In the Orlando case, which is also pending, the defendants have denied all allegations of wrongdoing and argued in part that their actions were not the cause of the injury.
A defendant involved with gate distribution said in a statement: “The incident involving Jacob Alexander Joseph was tragic and unfortunate,” but they “adamantly dispute” any responsibility or liability.
Summers initially sued the owners and operators of the building as well but is now seeking to drop the case against them.
The garage door sales company is seeking to dismiss the case; the judge has not yet ruled.
In the Orlando case, which is also pending, the defendants have denied all allegations of wrongdoing and argued in part that their actions were not the cause of the injury.
A defendant involved with gate distribution told us, “the incident involving Jacob Alexander Joseph was tragic and unfortunate,” but they “adamantly dispute” any responsibility or liability.
In both cases, we reached out to all plaintiffs and defendants.
Neither lawsuit has yet gone to trial.
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