Meister v. Alber

Briscoe, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The appellee brought suit in the Superior Court of Baltimore to recover for personal injuries sustained by him, caused by a fall through an elevator shaft in a building owned by the appellant. The judgment was for the plaintiff and the defendant has. appealed. The main questions in the case arise upon the prayers and relate to the negligence of the defendant and to the contributory negligence of the plaintiff.

The plaintiff’s prayers as granted by the Court are conceded to be free from any valid objection, and the exception to the modification of the defendant’s second and fourth prayers was abandoned at the hearing in this Court. So the questions to be passed upon are contained in the rulings of the Court upon the rejection of the defendant’s first and fifth prayers and its modification of the sixth. ⁷⁶ At the close of the testimony on both sides the Court was asked by the defendant’s first prayer to withdraw the case from the jury, because upon the undisputed evidence it is apparent that the plaintiff so directly contributed to the happening of the accident by his own want of ordinary care and prudence, that he cannot recover in this action. This prayer being in the nature of a demurrer to the evidence it becomes necessary for us to examine the facts of the case. The plaintiff testified that he was a butcher by trade and at the time of the accident had been employed by the defendant for over fifteen months at his place of business, corner of Pennsylvania avenue and Retreat street, Baltimore, and his work was to make sausage; that on the floor of the building, which is on a level with the street, there are two rooms — one called the slaughter-house and the other the cold-storage room, and between these there is an elevator shaft, the floor of the elevator being used as a passage between the two rooms, the former being about one foot higher than the cold-storage room ; that this elevator floor is the only means of communication between the two rooms, and the elevator was used by the defendant and his employees in taking meat between the different stories of the building, which consists of five stories, one below and four above the ground.

He further testified that on the morning of the accident he was told by the defendant to take sausage meat into the cold-storage room, and to •bring out cold meat and to begin making sausage, which was his daily occupation; that on his return he stepped in to take the elevator, feeling certain it was in its place, and fell 24 feet to the cellar below. There was other testimony on the part of the plaintiff and the defendant at the trial below, but from a careful examination of the record it will be found that the decisive and controlling fact in the case is the glaring act of carelessness on the part of the plaintiff in negligently attempting to cross the elevator floor without ascertaining whether it was in the place where he left it. According to his own testimony he was in a hurry, and ⁷⁷ in his own language, “If he had stopped long enough and looked extra” he would have seen that the elevator was not there. He was a man in the full possession of all his