Parents of 3-year-old who died after Independence Towers fall sue building owners
Two parents charged in the death of their 3-year-old son, who fell nine stories from the family’s Independence apartment last year, are suing the owners of the building, alleging they were negligent in not providing windows with safety features they said could have prevented the boy’s death.
The family complained about concerns they had about the windows before the deadly fall, an attorney for the family said.
Attorneys for Destiny Randle and Moses Bass — parents of Tidus Bass, who died in July after the fall at the Independence Towers building on North Jennings Road — alleged in court documents the window the child fell from lacked basic safety features, the apartments where the family lived suffered from systemic neglect, and management repeatedly ignored complaints of poor living conditions at the site.
The Star reported previously on living conditions at Independence Towers, as residents raised concerns over issues with plumbing and HVAC systems, flooding, mold and pests. The building is being sold through receivership proceedings overseen by a Jackson County judge after Fannie Mae said the site’s owners defaulted on their loan.
The new lawsuit, filed in Jackson County Circuit Court on Monday, names as defendants 728 N Jennings Rd Partners LLC, the embattled company managed by local landlord Parker Webb, which is the current owner of the building, as well as FTW Investments LLC, Tango Property Management and PR Independence LLC, former ownership and management groups for the site.
Randle and Bass are also suing Crown Window Corporation and Crystal Window and Door Systems, which the lawsuit said installed and manufactured the apartment’s windows.
Representatives for each of the companies named in the lawsuit did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Both parents were charged with counts of first-degree endangering the welfare of a child after Tidus’s death, and both are scheduled to go to trial later this year – Bass in September and Randle in November.
No window fall protection, no central AC
According to the lawsuit, as temperatures rose on the morning of July 29, Tidus and his brother woke up in their room and Tidus was “easily” able to open the window in his bedroom “because it lacked adequate locking mechanisms and other safety features to prevent him from doing so,” attorneys for the family wrote in court documents.
The window had no fall protection features like restrictor plates and window guards to keep him from falling, the lawsuit said, noting that the boy fell through the window’s torn screen nine stories to the ground below.
Tidus was taken to Centerpoint Medical Center and then to Children’s Mercy Hospital, where he died that day.
Andrew Goodwin, one of the civil attorneys representing the family, said his clients had complained to building management “numerous” times about the safety issue. He said the windows currently don’t meet building code and believes they were also out of code when they were installed in 2015.
“I don’t know how an apartment complex of this size would have been able to install those windows,” he said.
The fall risk posed by the windows was made even more severe by the need to keep windows open on hot days, attorneys said. Air conditioning didn’t work in the brick building, and the family’s two-bedroom apartment only had one window unit in the main living area, Goodwin said.
“It’s a brick building, and in the summer it’s like a pizza oven,” he said. “Those brick walls heat up all day, and you’re in there getting cooked. Depriving the people of air conditioning and then having unsafe windows is just a deadly combination, as we have seen.”
Independence Towers is the most egregious case of landlord neglect he had ever seen, he said, pointing to issues like roaches, bedbugs and mice, people getting stuck in the elevator and people camping in stairwells.
“It just goes on and on how hellish those towers are,” he said. “What I fear is that the child protective services and police mistook poverty for neglect.”
Grand jury indictment
A grand jury indictment, however, alleges the parents failed to supervise the child in a room with a window that could be opened.
A week before the fall, Independence police made a referral to state child welfare officials after another child from the home was found at a gas station a short distance from the apartments. Police eventually returned the child home, and Bass reported the child had been in trouble the day before, according to a police report.
The day of the fatal fall, Goodwin said Bass had checked on Tidus and his brother minutes prior, and then had stepped outside with the dog. Randle, who was pregnant at the time, was ill and suffering from morning sickness that day, he said.
“My hope is that with new leadership at the prosecutor’s office, this is not the kind of case that they would choose to pursue, because they will get acquitted,” Goodwin said. “These are good people who’ve had a terrible thing happen to them.”
Jazzlyn Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, said the cases were active and declined to comment.
Previous reporting from The Star’s Robert Cronkleton, Noelle Alviz-Gransee and Ilana Arougheti was used in this story.
