In Vargas v. Orosco (unpublished), a personal injury case involving a slip and fall on a staircase at a leased property, the Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court remanded the trial court’s grant of summary judgment to the landlords on the basis that a question of material fact existed as to whether the location of the incident was a common area under the landlords’ control or an area in the exclusive control of the tenant. The trial court found that the cause of the plaintiff’s fall was a latent defect unknown to the parties, so no liability could be attributed to the landlord. The Appellate Division, however, found that the trial court failed to make any findings concerning whether the staircase was in a common area, which could impose a duty on the landlord to inspect the staircase. The Court noted that New Jersey jurisprudence governing a landlord’s duty to inspect distinguishes between places that are within the exclusive control of the tenant and common areas or shared facilities pursuant to Coleman v. Steinberg and Gonzalez v. Safe & Sound Sec. Corp..
In this case, Plaintiff filed a lawsuit against her landlords after she fell on a staircase in the defendants’ property, where she was a tenant. Plaintiff was living on the third floor of the defendants’ home and had been there for two and a half months when the incident occurred. She fell while descending the rear staircase, alleging that the front lip of the stair she was stepping on collapsed, leading to her injuries. After the trial court issued summary judgment in favor of the landlords, Plaintiff appealed. In the appeal, Plaintiff argued that that the defendants had constructive notice of the dangerous condition due to their failure to inspect, discover, and remedy the defect in a common area. She also invoked the doctrine of res ipsa loquitor, suggesting that the circumstances of the accident were sufficient to infer negligence without the need for expert testimony.
The Court determined that the trial court’s holding that the landlords did not have a duty to inspect the staircases was sound if the staircase was in the Plaintiff’s exclusive control. Basing its analysis on the Coleman and Gonzalez cases, the Court held that the judge should have made factual findings with respect to whether the staircase was in a common area, which heightens the landlords’ duty to inspect the staircase as opposed to when a space is under Plaintiff’s exclusive control. From the record, the Court noted that it was unclear whether other tenants lived in the floors below Plaintiff, or if anyone other than Plaintiff used the staircase. With respect to Plaintiff’s res ipsa loquitor argument, the Court rejected Plaintiff’s position that expert testimony was not necessary to support a finding of negligence. The case was remanded to the trial court to make findings on whether the rear staircase is a common area of the house.
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