A man whose pregnant wife was killed when a drunken driver plowed into a cabana at a Fort Lauderdale hotel was awarded millions of dollars Tuesday.
A Broward Circuit Court jury awarded Michael DeMella $24 million and assigned 15 percent liability — or $3.6 million — to the Riverside Hotel.
The verdict comes more than three years after a drunken driver crossed a sidewalk, jumped the curb and crashed into the poolside cabana, killing Alanna DeMella 26, and her unborn son, who was to be named Joshua.
Her husband was in a restroom just a few feet away and suffered only minor injuries in the March 18, 2012, incident.
The Riverside Hotel released this statement in regard to the verdict:
“This was obviously a very tragic accident and first and foremost, we offer our condolences to the family. The jury properly found that the lion’s share of responsibility should be placed on the drunk driver who caused this accident. We remain confident that the hotel has no legal responsibility for this accident caused by that drunk driver. We look forward to working through the legal process to overturn the jury verdict. It would be inappropriate to comment further on a matter still pending in court.”
The remaining 85 percent of the responsibility was assigned to the driver, Rosa Rivera Kim, 37, of Plantation, who had a blood alcohol level three times above the legal limit at the time of the accident.
Kim pleaded guilty to two counts of DUI manslaughter and was sentenced to15 years in prison. She was five months pregnant at her sentencing hearing in January.
“He feels like both [the criminal and civil justice] systems worked,” Michael DeMella’s attorney, Brad Edwards, said of his client. “No matter what, you can never bring back Alanna. …He feels that [the jury] got this right.”
Alanna DeMella was seven months pregnant with her first child at the time of her death. The couple were in Fort Lauderdale for a two-day marriage conference at Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale. They won the trip from their home church in Woburn, Mass.
Michael DeMella filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Riverside Hotel in 2012. He was present throughout the six-day trial, and his late wife’s mother testified.
At trial, Edwards argued that the hotel knew of a growing danger caused by the road and should have built a barrier between the road and the cabana to protect guests. Evidence was introduced to show that the particular cabana where DeMella died was located in a vulnerable spot just off a sharp curve on the property with no protection from passing cars.
Edwards also argued the stretch of road posed a threat to guests because of the high volume of traffic caused by motorists using it to bypass Las Olas Boulevard — often at speeds far in excess of what the section of the road was designed to handle.
“This was not just your average road and this was not a freak accident,” Edwards said Wednesday. “In the two years before this accident, the hotel recognized a serious problem with the sharpness of the curve. The road was referred to by hotel management as a race track.”
emiller@tribune.com, 954-356-4544 or Twitter @EmilyBethMiller
