Truck damaged from chair flying from balcony; Austin man frustrated apartment complex didn't pay
AUSTIN, Texas - An Austin man is frustrated because an apartment complex refused to pay for damage to his truck. He believes they’re liable, but the complex said they aren’t.
"Volleyball, wind, crash bang, broken window," Kendall Gunier described what happened on July 28.
Gunier said late last month, he was playing volleyball with his friends at Aussie’s on Barton Springs Road.
"We saw signs from the weather that said there was a windstorm coming through, but we decided to keep playing," Gunier said.
The wind gusts reached almost 25 miles per hour.
"As we were playing, we heard a big crash," Gunier said.
He said people watched as a chair flew from a balcony at The Catherine apartment complex into the back windshield of his truck. There was shattered glass, the window was busted, and a chair was found on the ground right next to Gunier’s truck.
Gunier met with the property manager the next day.
"Would you guys mind just covering this through your insurance?" Gunier said, he asked the property manager.
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"I'm met with hostility, and why would we be responsible for this? It wasn't any of our furniture. It had been from one of our tenants," Gunier said, the property manager replied.
The property manager told Gunier in an email, "We require each resident to hold renter’s insurance, and not knowing for certain if it was from one of the apartments in our building, or who it could have belonged to, this is not something that management would reimburse."
Gunier believes the complex is liable. A personal injury attorney said not necessarily.
"Unless you can show that the apartment complex was built in a way in which things would fall," personal injury attorney Adam Loewy said. "That is obviously the fault of the building or the apartment complex, but when it's just a random chair, you need to be able to show whose it was, so he's almost certainly out of luck."
Gunier does have car insurance. He paid his deductible himself and fixed his back window.
"It's very important to carry adequate insurance. Things do happen. There's many people out there without insurance and then there's just random things that happen that you can't prove who was at fault and so that's where you need to turn to your insurance and make sure they take care of it," Loewy said.
Gunier said in the future, he hopes the apartment complex will warn residents when a windstorm is coming, so they can secure all their items on their balconies and a situation like this won’t happen to anyone else.