Jury awards $630,000 in ice storm death at Little Rock retirement complex

A Pulaski County jury has awarded more than $630,000 to the family of a 98-year-old widow said to have frozen to death in a west Little Rock retirement complex during the 2012 Christmas ice storm that ravaged the capital city and central Arkansas.

Jurors, concluding a six-day wrongful-death trial on Monday, found that negligence by the owners and operators of Andover Place retirement facility on Andover Court off Cantrell Road caused Dovie Jewell Davis' death from hypothermia.

Davis, who had to rely on a wheelchair to get around, was "trapped" for 36 hours in the facility after a power failure Christmas evening knocked out its heating system and elevators, said lawyer Greg Campbell, who represented the Davis family with attorney John Hout.

The lawyers said the storm dropped 10 inches of snow on Little Rock and disrupted electrical services for more than 180,000 area residents. The emergency room doctor who treated Davis after rescuers got her to the hospital on Dec. 27, 2012, testified that she had the coldest body temperature of any living person he had seen, Campbell told jurors.

Read more: http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/sep/21/award-630-000-in-ice-storm-death-201709/