Suburban Pa. Jury Delivers $5.85M Verdict, Targeting Successor Company in Fatal Plastic-Winder Death

The issue of whether Reifenhauser could be held liable for a product Wintech developed was a focus of arguments at trial.

A Pennsylvania jury has awarded nearly $6 million to the family of an employee who was fatally crushed by a plastic film winding machine, concluding that defendant Reifenhauser Blown Film GmbH & Co. KG could be held liable as the successor to the machine’s original manufacturer under Pennsylvania’s product-line exception doctrine.

Last week, a Luzerne County jury returned a $5.85 million verdict to the family of Iris Adams in a wrongful death products liability case stemming from a June 2023 accident at an i2M facility in Mountain Top, Pennsylvania. Although the winder machine at issue was manufactured by Wintech Winding Technology AG, the plaintiffs contended that Reifenhauser should be held responsible because it allegedly acquired Wintech and its manufacturing assets.

The jury found that the defective winder was a factual cause of Adams’ injuries and that the product-line exception, which can allow a company that acquires a defunct manufacturer’s assets and continues its operations to be held liable for defects in the predecessor’s products, applied to Reifenhauser, awarding $5 million for Adams’ conscious pain and suffering and $850,000 in wrongful death damages to her two children.

Samuel B. Dordick and Max Dehon of Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky, represented Adams’s daughter, and told Law.com that the issue of whether Reifenhauser could be held liable for a product Wintech developed was a focus of arguments at trial.

While the defense had contended that Reifenhauser couldn’t be held responsible for Wintech’s allegedly defective machine because it had only purchased Wintech’s stock rather than its manufacturing assets, Dordick claimed that evidence at trial showed “exactly the opposite.”

According to Dordick, the team relied on trial and deposition testimony from the company’s experts to show that, along with acquiring stock, the company acquired Wintech’s intellectual property, branding, trademarks, design drawings and blue prints of the machines. He claimed that this testimony and evidence “completely obliterated this defense that Reifenhauser wanted to push, that it was an uninvolved shareholder.”

“A lot of the testimony and evidence in the case pretty firmly established, we feel, that Reifenhauser acquired these manufacturing assets from Wintech, and then continued essentially the same manufacturing operations, which is an element of the product line exception test,” Dordick said. “We’re grateful that the jury paid attention to the evidence, considered the evidence that we showed them, and importantly, what Reifenhauser didn’t show them. We pointed out in closing argument that Reifenhauser had come in with this defense of we’re just a shareholder, but then didn’t actually produce any kind of evidence or testimony that that was the case. And the testimony, we feel, weighed pretty heavily in the other direction.”

Thomas W. Repczynski of Offit Kurman, in Tysons Corner, Virginia, represented the defense and declined to comment.

The lawsuit stemmed from allegations that Adams, who was 53 at the time, was killed while cleaning a winder machine, which was allegedly in an idle state when its carrier arms unexpectedly moved without operator input, crushing Adams between the winding shaft and contact roller. Coworkers activated the emergency stop and called 911, but Adams remained conscious for up to 55 minutes before dying from blunt traumatic torso injuries.

According to the plaintiff’s pretrial memo, the machine, manufactured by Wintech in 1998, was defectively because it lacked a perimeter safety fence.

When it came to the defective design claim, Dordick shared that they used testimony from Adams’ coworkers and expert engineer Daniel McDonough to simplify the machinery and explain how the incident occurred.

“We were able to show and establish largely using some post incident testing that Reifenhauser did itself to establish that a signal failure in a sensor that was within the machine is what caused the machine to malfunction,” he said. “Then through expert testimony, laying out for the jury all of the different kind of safety technology that Wintech was aware of and had actually used on other machines, but for inexplicable reasons, failed to incorporate them into this machine that would have automatically shut down the machine if somebody was in the area where Iris was when she was cleaning it.”

According to Dordick, the trial began Oct. 13 and lasted about a week, with the jury returning its verdict on Oct. 20 after roughly an hour and a half of deliberations.