Young Indian American Woman Injured in Freak Accident Files Lawsuit Against NYC Penthouse
- Annabel Sen suffered severe brain injuries when she was struck by a lounge chair fell from a rooftop.
A young Indian American woman is suing a New York City penthouse owner for negligence after a lounge chair that fell from the building’s roof hit her and altered her life. According to a New York Post report, Annabel Sen was left with brain injuries after she was hit by “a heavy wooden lounge chair that fell from the terrace of the 12th-floor penthouse of the 15 Union Square West Condominium building” on Jan. 25. She was on her way to a lunch date with her boyfriend.
Citing the lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court on Sept. 24, the New York Post said that Sen, then 23, a Midtown West resident, who was heading to lunch at Xu’s Public House nearby, “suffered a severe, life-threatening, traumatic brain injury, among other injuries, that required emergency brain surgery.” Since then, Sen has had two more brain surgeries, the court papers claim., according to the New York Post. The lounge chair should have been secured on the terrace, “especially since it was a rainy day with very windy conditions,” the lawsuit says, as per the Post report.
Sen is suing GR Realty Holdings LLC, which is owned by Michael Rubin, the co-owner of the 76ers basketball franchise and the New Jersey Devils hockey franchise. The suit names building owner and management companies and penthouse residents Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, who are both co-founders of startup company Brex.
In a report after the Jan. 25 incident, the New York Post, quoting officials said the “wooden lawn chair and its cushion were blown off the 12th floor of 15 Union Square West at about 2 p.m. and plummeted down to the sidewalk, hitting a 23-year-old woman in the head and damaging a parked car.” Sen suffered a laceration to the head, the Post reported then, adding that “she was taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition.”
Patrice Demay who witnessed the freak accident told the Post that Sen passed out after the chair hit her. “We thought she was dead. It really hit her hard.”
“How [the chair] didn’t kill her is a miracle honestly,” Sen’s lawyer Benedict Morelli told The Post. “She is very damaged but she is not dead.” He told the Post that his client had to leave Manhattan and move to Connecticut to live with her parents. The court documents claim that Sen “has been unable to attend to her usual vocation and activities,” and she’s been forced to pay for medical bills. Morelli told the Post that Sen no longer works at her job and won’t be attending Harvard this fall.
“She is not doing anything now. She is just seeing doctors and recuperating. She has cognitive deficits,” he said. “This was a young woman who was very gifted before the accident and we are hoping she gets back all of her faculties.”
Sen’s LinkedIn profile shows that she worked as a private equity analyst at Digital Colony. Prior to that she was an analyst at Fidelity Investments. Sen graduated from Brown University and later completed a Business Bridge Program at Tuck School of Business at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.