Becker v. Philadelphia

Citations

• 212 Pa. 379
• 61 A. 942
• 1905 Pa. LEXIS 624

Syllabus

<p>Negligence—Municipalities—Defect in sidewalk—Contributory negligence— Evidence—Question for jury.</p> <p>In an action by a woman to recover damages for personal injuries sustained by a fall in a hole on a sidewalk in a city, it appeared that the accident occurred about eleven o’clock in the morning. The hole was about five feet from the curb line, and was nineteen inches long and eighteen inches wide. A tree had formerly stood there, but had been cut down several months before. Plaintiff had no knowledge of the hole. Just before she reached the pavement in which the hole existed, a crowd of twenty-five or thirty men approached her with suit cases and bags in their hands. Plaintiff was carrying a large market basket and a butter kettle. The crowd separated and allowed her to pass through, and almost immediately after emerging from the crowd she stepped into the hole and fell. On her examination in chief she stated that she stepped into the opening almost the instant she got through the crowd that had concealed it from her. On cross-examination she gave the distance as six or eight feet, after repeatedly saying she did not know what it was. Held, that it was error to enter a nonsuit, and that the jury should have been instructed that if they believed, after plaintiff had passed through the crowd she had an opportunity to see the opening, and by the exercise of ordinary care in looking where she was going, ought to have avoided it, she could not recover; but that if she stepped into it just as she*got through the crowd, without having had an opportunity to see it, or if, burdened as she was, she stepped into it after having emerged from the crowd, and, under the circumstances, could not be reasonably expected to have seen it before stepping into it, her negligence was not a bar to her right to recover.</p>