A jury last week awarded $5.19 million to a Long Beach man who sued the city after a tree branch weighing around 200 pounds fell on him and knocked him unconscious while he walked his dog in El Dorado Park.
The dog, Cookie, escaped unharmed and ran to a neighbor’s house, but bystanders had to pull the large branch off Joseph Robinson, 68, before he was rushed to the hospital.
He suffered life-altering injuries, according to his attorney, including post-traumatic stress disorder, spinal damage that required doctors to fuse two portions of his spine and a concussion that still causes lingering balance issues.
Robinson had to retire from teaching and give up high-performance sports like skiing, surfing and skateboarding he’d enjoyed for decades, according to his lawyer Brian Breiter.
“If this was a child or an older person who wasn’t in incredible shape like him, it would have killed him,” Breiter said.
The jury’s unanimous verdict included $188,470 for Robinson’s medical expenses and $4.9 million for non-economic damages such as his suffering, loss of enjoyment of his life, anxiety and emotional distress, according to Breiter.
The city of Long Beach plans to file post-trial motions seeking to reverse or reduce the judgment, and if that fails, they will consider appealing, according to Principal Deputy City Attorney Howard Russell.
To win the verdict for Robinson, Breiter and his co-counsel, Jeff Twomey, had to not only convince jurors that the tree was dangerous but that city officials knew this could happen and didn’t take reasonable action to prevent it.
The attorneys relied on a 2016 city audit that warned Long Beach wasn’t properly maintaining its trees, escalating the risk of falling branches. After years of underfunding maintenance, the city said in 2021 that 14,000 of its 29,000 trees were “dead, diseased or dying.”
Since the time of the audit, the city has removed 5,333 dangerous trees, according to Jane Grobaty, a spokesperson for the Parks, Recreation and Marine Department. The City Council also appropriated $400,000 in recent years to execute a 7-year trimming cycle in an attempt to save trees with pruning and other maintenance.
This tree in particular, an ash that stands along a sidewalk between the skate park and tennis center in El Dorado Park, was listed in “poor” condition in city records, according to city records Breiter showed the jury.
Russell said the tree was inspected and trimmed less than a year before the branch fell on Robinson in May 2023. According to Russel, “the tree and its branches were healthy, and there was no indication that there was any danger of a branch falling.”
At trial, Breiter said this maintenance was more akin to a haircut than checking for structural problems, and jurors ultimately decided the city’s interventions were inadequate.
As he summed up his case for jurors at the end of a five-day trial, Breiter assumed the perspective of the tree, artificially lowering his voice and offering a monologue about how he never intended to hurt anyone as he decayed.
“I wasn’t hiding it — I showed signs. I leaned. I split. My bark thinned, … but no one came to check. Not once,” he said as the tree. “They trimmed me — yes — but they never looked at me. Not really.”
Breiter said the verdict $5.19 million is among the largest against any city for a tree-related case. Last year, Long Beach paid $1.4 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a mother and her 6-year-old hit by a falling tree branch in Whaley Park in 2021.