Years after accident, former student files suit
Jimmy Eichorn may need medical care for the rest of his life.
The former USC student fell from a window in the Sigma Nu house early one Tuesday morning in February 2010. According to court documents, he’d been drinking and landed on the patio below his second-story room.
Police tape cordoned off the Greek Village house that day; that night, more than 100 students gathered to show him their support.
Eichorn suffered injuries to his brain, skeleton, respiratory system, skull and facial bones, according to the filings.
“He has lost the ability to take care of himself, to provide for himself and to live on his own,” his attorney, Mark Tanenbaum, wrote in the initial filing. “He is … permanently and totally disabled and will need medical care for the rest of his life.”
Earlier this month, he filed suit against USC, the house’s architect and constructor, Sigma Nu fraternity and its local chapter. Tanenbaum declined further comment, citing the pending lawsuit.
In court filings, Eichorn and his lawyer claim those groups failed to take precautions to prevent such a fall because windows in the house were allowed to open too high. Representatives of each, they say, approved plans that didn’t include window restrictors.
Such restrictors are a key focus of a memo written by Dennis Pruitt, USC’s vice president for student affairs, after a young woman fell from a window in Patterson Hall and died in August 2002.
In that memo, sent in August 2004 and included with the filing, USC established a standard that residence hall windows can’t open more than 10 inches.
Under USC’s policy, restrictors can be added to windows on the first few floors of a building only if it has a sprinkler system. According to court documents, plans for the Sigma Nu house, approved in November 2002, included sprinklers.
Those plans were approved by a university review board. Houses in the Greek Village have to follow a list of 17 guidelines set by USC.
Those guidelines, included in the initial filing, regulate landscaping, cosmetics and some design aspects of Greek houses, but do not mention their windows.
That’s because USC’s 10-inch standard doesn’t apply to Greek housing, according to university spokesman Wes Hickman, as the buildings aren’t owned by USC, and the specifics of their construction are governed by local building codes.
According to Jerry Brewer, associate vice president for student affairs, that distinction explained, in part, why the university didn’t change its policies in the years following Eichorn’s fall.
“It’s not university policy,” Brewer said. “That’s building code.”
Whether USC should have made changes is “the essence of the lawsuit,” he said.
Regardless, in a filing last Friday, the university contended through Michael Pauley, an attorney, that it can’t be responsible for Eichorn’s injuries, citing the state Tort Claims Act, which sets the statute of limitations at two years.
Whether USC’s motion to have the case dismissed will be accepted is not yet clear as the lawsuit is pending.
The case’s other defendants had not submitted any filings by Wednesday.