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Jiminez vs. Greene (exploding toilet case)

The explosion case, which got some notoriety in the Torrance area, arose from our client, who was a Mexican immigrant. We got involved 16 days after the explosion. A gentleman had sat down on the toilet in the morning, lit a cigarette as part of his daily routine to get ready for the five jobs that he carried out during the course of the day. He was a hard worker, and supported both a family here and a family in Mexico. As he lit the cigarette at 6:00 in the morning, the bathroom exploded, and he ran, burning, through the apartment in front of his five children, past his wife, and burned on the front lawn of his apartment. A big question was why this happened. The management evicted the family, blaming them for the fire by claiming that he worked at a silk-screen factory and that some kind of flammable materials that he had been working with were brought home. At the same time, he was on a 21-day watch at the burn center and ultimately, the day that I went to meet him, he perished, about 15 minutes before I even reached the hospital. Now, of course, the investigation that we were engaging in was secondary to the official fire department investigation, in which they had concluded that the culprit was something associated with the clothing that he was wearing as part of his work. There was one problem, though - the hamper, which housed all of his dirty clothes, did not burn; neither did it singe. So there was no evidence of a track of flame that went from or to the purported source of flammable material. What we did find, though, was a little hole behind the valve at the wall, which is where the water valve is that turns on and off your water closet. At that valve there was a tiny hole that you could see was only about a half inch in diameter, and when we went to the next room behind the bathroom, we saw a garage. We did an investigation in the garage, and what we found in there was a Sparklett's bottle, which didn’t have anything in it, but smelled of gasoline. What we found out when we interviewed tenants was that another tenant there was operating a business out of the garage, which was an auto repair business. And a very inexpensive, but very dangerous, way of cleaning auto parts that are greasy is to use hydrocarbon-content materials such as gasoline, and that's what was being done. We inspected the proximity of that Sparklett's bottle to where the hole was; it was very close. When the garage door went open, it created a Venturi effect and the air from the garage would go through that little hole, forced by the draft. Then we brought the Sparklett's bottle back to the scene, and used dry ice in the Sparklett's bottle, we videotaped the hole inside the apartment bathroom, opened the garage door, and watched the smoke from the dry ice go right through that hole into the apartment's bathroom. And for the purposes of the jury, it was very, very obvious that the fumes had penetrated through that hole into the bathroom. And, of course, the way that hydrocarbon-contented material fumes work is that you can't see them, but they are low so they actually stayed at the ground. On cross examination when the fire chief was testifying with his credentials and his uniform, we were able to demonstrate that our theory was much more likely than the one that they had officially written. In a very, very dramatic courtroom scene, he changed his testimony and adopted our theory. We did get a $3.6 million verdict in that case. Later, the case was lost on appeal, and they reversed the verdict on a very interesting basis. They took away the verdict on the basis that my immigrant plaintiff was not entitled to the dollars that he got for wages, even though he was working in the United States. They said he wasn't entitled to it as a Mexican immigrant. So we had to retry the case on the basis of whether or not he had gotten an excessive award because it was based on his American earnings as opposed to Mexican pesos, which would have been much less. We investigated the basis of whether he was entitled to U.S. wages. We sent an investigative team up to Fresno, where he had purportedly worked in the fields as a picker for strawberries, during a point in time when California had specifically created exceptions. The federal government had acknowledged these exceptions for immigrants because this was work that was not being done by American workers and it needed to be done. So the government authorized, for limited purposes, immigrants to come in and do this work for U.S. wages. So we were able to establish at the Escobar Immigration Service that indeed, when we showed him a picture of this gentleman, that he had worked there, and we got a declaration. And we went back to retry that case. The next day, Mr. Winter paid $4.6, which was substantially higher than the award that we had originally won.

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