Bike crash appeal denied

City sought to overturn $300K judgment for man who hit storm drain in ’17

A judge has dismissed an appeal by city of Annapolis attorneys in a long-running personal injury case brought by a man who crashed his bike on a city storm drain in 2017.

In an opinion released Thursday, Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Richard R. Trunnell denied an appeal filed by Assistant City Attorney Joel Braithwaite, arguing that a jury erred in awarding a $300,000 judgment to Matthew Hager, of Annapolis, after he suffered serious facial injuries when his bike tire got caught in a gap in a city storm drain on Chinquapin Round Road. Braithwaite requested either a new trial, a reduction in the size of the judgment or for the court to reverse the verdict in favor of the city “to correct the manifest injustice and clearly erroneous rulings” by a “runaway jury,” he wrote in court documents.

In the 59-page opinion, Trunnell described the city’s arguments as “meritless.”

“The Office of Law is reviewing the court order and has nothing to add at this time,” said Mitchelle Stephenson, city spokesperson.

The city’s appeal followed a four-day trial held in late April in which the jury heard from Hager’s friends, family and various experts who discussed details of the accident, his injuries and the lengthy recovery process that followed. After deliberating for an hour, the jury returned a verdict in Hager’s favor, concluding the city was at fault for the accident.

Braithwaite called the verdict “shocking” and the judgment disproportionate to the amount Hager deserved. While the judgment was more than the $75,000 Hager had been seeking, it was still less than the $400,000 maximum liability of a local government for a personal injury claim, according to state law. City attorneys had sought to lessen the judgment to $30,000.

Braithwaite also accused Hager’s attorney Joe Donahue of using “reptilian tactics” when he was describing Hager’s injuries to the jury by “speaking to, and scaring, the primitive parts of jurors’ brains … [that] they share with reptiles.”

In his opinion, Trunnell wrote that Donahue’s trial tactics did not cause the jury “to abandon its objective role in determining damages...”

In a counter-filing requesting the city’s motion be dismissed, Donahue rejected Braithwaite’s claims as “unfounded and detrimentally misleading.”

“There is nothing ‘shocking’ about the verdict in this case,” Donahue wrote. “The bottom line is that the actions of the city employees who caused this accident were not defensible.”

The accident: On June 6, 2017, Hager, then 27, was bicycling with his girlfriend in the bike lane along the two-lane Chinquapin Round Road near Lincoln Drive. As he traveled over a city storm drain, his tire got caught in a gap between the road and the metal grate. The road bike stopped abruptly. Hager, an avid cyclist, didn’t.

Hager’s bike crumpled underneath him and he toppled over the handlebars, landing face-first, he said. His cheek struck the metal storm drain and then the pavement beside it, causing deep gashes to the right side of his face that took out a piece of his eyebrow and required more than a dozen stitches, he said. Tiny particles of asphalt were embedded in his cheek. As he sat up, dazed, his eye swelled shut and blood poured from his wounds.

“My face broke my fall,” said Hager, now 32, in an interview in May just days before the anniversary of the accident.

Hager’s girlfriend testified that she thought “he is dead or he is paralyzed” after she saw him on the pavement.

“My body scorpioned so bad she thought I was dead,” Hager said. “I didn’t realize how injured I was until people were praying over me.”

In the weeks after the crash, Hager suffered debilitating headaches and blurry vision that made it impossible to look at a phone or computer screens, he said. Unable to work, he was confined to his cool air-conditioned apartment to let his wounds heal.

A week after the crash, Hager filed a claim with the city for his injury, which was denied. In November 2019, Hager filed a lawsuit claiming the city was negligent for not properly installing the storm drain — called Grate 207, in court — which left a gap wide enough to catch his tire.

In response, attorneys for the city accused Hager of contributory negligence, arguing that because he was riding against traffic without a helmet, he was partially to blame for the crash. Maryland does not require cyclists over the age of 16 to wear a helmet.

After COVID-19 shut down Anne Arundel Circuit Court for more than a year, a jury was selected in late April and a trial began.

While it is not uncommon for civil cases to go to trial, jury trials for personal injury claims are exceedingly rare. Estimates from the U.S. Justice Department show that more than 90% of such cases end in a pretrial settlement. A 2005 Justice Department survey found that just 3.5% of personal injury cases went to trial.

Asked in June why the city chose to pursue a jury trial in this case as opposed to settling, City Attorney Mike Lyles said, “I’m ethically obligated to zealously defend the city.

“If someone is injured by city activity, we resolve those claims all the time where it is clear where someone did something wrong who works for the city,” he said. “But I think we are obliged where evidence has been presented to try those cases and stress those facts, so that the city isn’t being abused or coffers exposed. That is not fair to the taxpayer.”

The grate: Because the vast majority of personal injury cases end in settlements, details of these types of lawsuits are seldom made public.

Donahue was able to call numerous witnesses to the stand, including a plastic surgeon to testify about the extent of Hager’s facial injuries. A bike expert spoke about the damage done to Hager’s road bike. Accounts from witnesses from a nearby church who came upon Hager moments after the crash were also read into the record. In its appeal, the city argued that much of the testimony shouldn’t have been permitted because of perceived bias, a notion Donahue forcefully disagrees with in counter filings. Trunnell concurred in the opinion.

Other key evidence presented at court were the details of a similar bike crash from 2012 in which a man named Mike Hartsky was riding on Duke of Gloucester Street and crashed when his wheel stuck in a gap in a storm drain. Afterward, Hartsky, who was unharmed, reported the crash to city officials warning in an Aug. 24, 2012 email of the dangers of the gap in the grate. Hartsky attached photos and urged officials to review other grates along the street ahead of a scheduled bike race.

In follow-up emails presented in court, the city’s Chief Engineer Samuel Brice agreed that the condition of the grate was unsafe because it lacked two replacement bolts that could fix the issue by eliminating the gap between the road and the grate if they were installed. One email from Brice did note that “when you walk, drive or bike, you have to pay attention. Actively deciding to drive on the edge of the grate instead of on either the grate or the pavement next to the grate is not paying attention.”

After Hartsky’s crash, according to court documents, the city purchased bolts to fix the gaps in the storm drains, going so far as to load the bolts onto Department of Public Works trucks. But they were not yet installed when Hager crashed.

Brice confirmed this in a July 2020 deposition that the city “did not investigate [Hager’s] specific accident because the city already understood what caused the accident,” according to court records.

For five years, dozens of grates remained unsecured, though no accidents were reported until Hager crashed and revived the issue.

“People said, when you ride a bike, you accept a certain risk that you could hit something in the road. You know what, that’s true,” Hager said. “You have to watch out for it, but you know what? I don’t expect there to be a gap in a storm drain in a brand new bike lane. I expect the brand new bike lane to be safe.”

The city has since installed the bolts to ensure all storm drain grates are bike safe, said Stephenson, the city spokesperson. The city has about 2,500 storm drains of different varieties, according to court records. The grate Hager struck was a WR replacement grate, of which the city has 321, Stephenson said.

“All known WR replacement grates currently have bolts installed,” she wrote in an email. “If it appears that a grate of any type is missing bolts, we do ask that you contact [public works] utilities to have them immediately installed.”

‘I just want it to be over’: While Hager’s crash occurred six months before Mayor Gavin Buckley was elected in December 2017, the legal battles have consumed half of the Democratic mayor’s 4 ½ years in office.

Hager said he found it perplexing that the mayor’s attorneys would accuse Hager of being partially at fault in the crash when Buckley, also a bike enthusiast, is a staunch proponent for making Annapolis a more bike-friendly town.

“I lived two houses down from City Hall and I’ve seen Gavin biking sometimes with a helmet and sometimes without a helmet,” Hager said. “I like him, but I think it’s ironic he’s pushing for a more bike-friendly city, yet, the city can’t even get their own people to install these bolts during routine inspections” in the years before the accident.

In March, Hager moved to California for work. Though he says he misses Maryland, putting thousands of miles between him and the site of the crash has helped him heal, Hager said in early August just prior to Trunnell’s ruling. His body has healed from the crash, though the quarter-sized mark under his right eye elicits questions from strangers “numerous times a week,” Hager said.

Hager, who was born in Annapolis, said the ordeal has made him resentful of the city and its leaders.

“I just want it to be over,” he said. “I still love Annapolis, but I’m not going to let those people ruin it for me.”