An Arizona woman has been awarded $7.25 million by a federal court in California after a day of magic at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter with her grandson ended with her in an ambulance.
Earlier this month, a jury found Universal Studios Hollywood responsible for the crushed spine that lawyers said 74-year-old Pamela Morrison suffered when exiting the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride in September 2022. She had been asked to exit the ride after her harness failed to secure, then slipped when stepping from the moving walkway onto solid ground, according to court documents.
“The belt was still moving, and so my foot went on that belt and then … my other foot went on to the stationary floor, and it knocked me off my feet,” said Morrison, describing the fall in court documents.
At trial, her attorney, Taylor Kruse, argued that the fall was due to employees’ failure to halt the moving walkway and allow the woman to exit the ride in a safe manner, causing her to suffer an intensely painful injury that temporarily prevented her from using the bathroom independently, according to reporting by Law360.
Kruse argued that stopping the belt would have been a safe, easy and reasonable thing to do, but the Universal City amusement park wanted to “keep the ride moving no matter what” and meet its goal of seating 1,800 riders per hour, the legal site reported.
Much of the case hinged on a few seconds of surveillance camera footage showing the fall.
The defense team for Universal Studios argued, according to the legal site, that the video showed that Morrison was focused on her grandson and not on where she was stepping, so the fall was her fault.
In court documents, the company’s attorneys alleged that Morrison “failed to use and exercise, for her own protection, the proper care, and precautions reasonably prudent people under the same or similar circumstances would have exercised.”
Nevertheless, the jury was not swayed, finding the theme park to be responsible for creating the dangerous conditions that led to Morrison’s accident.
Safety expert Ban Choi, of the Institute of Risk & Safety Analyses, said the design of the ride was dangerous because it required people to step perpendicularly off the moving walkway onto the stationary floor.
“Entering and exiting a moving walkway perturbs the gait stability of the walkers, even when entering/exiting in the longitudinal direction of the moving walkway,” he wrote in a review of the incident submitted to the court. “Given that Plaintiff Morrison was walking in the lateral direction of the moving walkway while feeling rushed to get off the moving walkway, her gait instability would have been greater.”
A previous Times analysis showed that being injured when getting on or off a ride is fairly common, accounting for about 1 in 8 accident reports at Southern California theme parks.
After the fall, Morrison was transported to a local hospital in an ambulance and incurred significant medical expenses. She suffered a fracture in her lower back and a significant tear in some of the muscles around her hip that help with movement and stability, according to court documents.
A jury awarded her $250,000 for economic damages, $2 million for past noneconomic damages and $5 million for future noneconomic damages, according to court documents.
