Jury awards $4M for drowning
Pool firm liable for 5-year-old’s death
CYNTHIA DIPASQUALE
Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer

September 24, 2007 6:34 PM

The parents of a 5-year-old boy who drowned in an Anne Arundel County country club pool won a $4 million judgment Monday against the pool’s management company.

Connor Freed died in June 2006 while spending a day swimming at the Crofton Country Club with family friends. His family claims D.R.D. Pool Service Inc., the pool management company, was negligent in not posting enough lifeguards and not sufficiently training the ones on duty.

The jury awarded $2,000,076 to each parent, after deliberating for three hours over two days. The $76 was apparently the jury’s way of remembering Connor, whose birthday was July 6.

“This jury verdict was very well thought out and they came to the right conclusion that the management of this pool failed miserably in guarding lives in the pool,” the family’s attorney, Gary A. Wais said.

He added that the verdict is one of the largest for a wrongful death suit in Anne Arundel County.

After applying Maryland’s cap on non-economic damages, the amount of the award will shrink to about $1.3 million, Wais said.

However, Wais said his clients may file an appeal to challenge the cap, so “the jury’s verdict is respected and honored, and not disregarded after the jury comes to a conclusion.”

Connor Freed was at the pool with a family friend, Paul Carroll, and Carroll’s two children on June 22, 2006. As the boy was walking to the bathroom by himself, he fell into the pool and drowned. Allegedly, only one lifeguard was on duty at the time: a 16-year-old who had been lifeguarding for just three weeks. She did not notice Connor floating in the pool, nor did she come to the boy’s rescue when Carroll’s daughter spotted him. Once other lifeguards responded, they allegedly performed CPR incorrectly and declined to use a defibrillator.

Connor’s parents, Thomas Freed and Debra Neagle Webber, filed suit for $20 million a month after the drowning. “This was not a simple misdeed that the people at a pool did,” said Connor’s father, Thomas Freed. “It was a series of accidents that were waiting to happen. Unfortunately, our son was there that day and I guess all those things lined up. He was the one carrying the cross for that.”

Attorneys for D.R.D. did not return a phone call for comment yesterday. The company had cross-complained against Carroll, the family friend, but the jury found him not liable.

Survival action barred

While the case was in many ways a big victory for the Freed family, Wais and co-counsel H. Briggs Bedigian said they still plan to appeal a pretrial ruling that banned Connor’s estate from recovering separately for the boy’s conscious pain and suffering while he drowned. “We plan on challenging that part of the case, so when a child drowns, they can be compensated for that — it’s part of the case because any person with common sense knows that a person who is alive and well and doesn’t have some weird medical condition will experience agony when they drown,” Bedigian said. “I think for that not to be in the case was the most difficult thing, legally to get over.”

Connor’s parents created the Connor Cares Foundation, which so far has focused on getting legislation to standardize pool safety regulations throughout the state. Freed said the family would also like to see a rating system for pool safety.