The estate of a 2-year-old girl killed in a fire is suing the company that owns South Fork Trailer Park and three individuals involved with the company for wrongful death.
Named in the lawsuit are Strategic Investments of Oregon, Inc.; Jerald E. Fox, an officer and employee of the company; Theodore E. Fox, president; and Roberta J. Fox, secretary.
Denise Soto is the personal representative for the estate of Alexis Ann Cardwell who died on Feb. 4 in a mobile home fire. Alexis lived in the mobile home with her father, Shane Cardwell and Stephanie Pressey along with four other children. Charissa Cardwell is the surviving mother.
The cause of the fire, according to the lawsuit was faulty wiring in the mobile home.
Substantially contributing to her death was the “absence of a standard operating smoke detector outside of the bedrooms of the occupants of the mobile home that would have wakened the adult occupants sooner,” the lawsuit says.
It alleges that the mobile home had an unreasonably dangerous connection between a four-wire appliance plug from a washer-dryer unit to a three-wire 220-volt receptacle and that Strategic Investments provided the unit three weeks prior to the fire.
The lawsuit further alleges that the three-wire appliance plug was previously rewired for a prior tenant with the consent of Strategic Investments, and the work was not performed by a licensed electrician.
The lawsuit says the manager of the park should have known the unit was in poor mechanical condition and partially inoperable and that after it was installed, the tenants complained of flickering lights and “other symptoms of electrical malfunction.”
The lawsuit charges that Strategic Investments rented the mobile home in an uninhabitable condition, in violation of landlord-tenant law.
For being deprived of their daughter, Alexis’ mother and father are seeking $350,000 in damages. The estate of Alexis is seeking $500,000 in economic damages representing the value of her estate if she would have lived a normal lifespan.
The lawsuit is false, Jerald Fox said. “There’s no validity to it at all.
“It’s just an attempt to get some money out of me. If I give them anything, I give them a bonus for being dopey and stupid. We definitely didn’t install it. We told them not to use it because it was burned out.”
Fox said the family took the drier out of a junk pile and installed it anyway.
“To make a long story short, we’ve got 35 units there,” Fox said of the allegation about the smoke detector. They have 110 smoke detectors, and the fire department found a few not working. “The reason they’re not working is because they take the batteries out and use them in their radios.”