Three jurors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the fact that the mall and Sea Life kept the escalator and common area inspected and up to all legal safety codes meant they found no reason to assign negligence to either party for the fall.
Eric Smith spent the day at the Mall of America with his two sons that Monday in February 2019. They had just moved from Pennsylvania to Minnesota.
After visiting the Sea Life Aquarium, located in a sublevel of the mall, they rode the escalators up to the first floor. Eric took a phone call about an apartment he was looking at and stepped a short distance away from his children.
One of his boys stood near the down escalator and began playing with the moving handrail, pulling at it a handful of times, while trying to look at the stingrays below. It had been installed in 1992 when the mall opened and was moving at 100 feet per minute. He grabbed the handrail, was pulled off the floor, tilted over the side and plummeted to the sublevel below.
“Not in my worst fears did I think that could happen,” Smith testified at trial.
Guests watch stingrays at the Sea Life Aquarium at the Mall of America in 2014. (Leslie Plesser)
Camarotto pressed him on how he was monitoring his kids.