Case Background

Our client was twelve years old the summer she started volunteering as a child volunteer at a children’s day camp in Denver. It was the kind of role a lot of pre-teens take on: showing up early, helping younger kids with activities, doing odd jobs around the facility. She wasn’t paid. She wasn’t formally trained. She was, in a lot of ways, treated like just another set of hands — except she was still a child herself.

On the morning in question, camp staff asked our client and another child volunteer, age eleven, to move a piece of old playground equipment — a tetherball pole and its base — across the play area to use as an anchor for some tape. It sounds like a small, unremarkable task. It wasn’t.

The tetherball set had been sitting on that playground, by our count, for at least a year in a visibly deteriorating state. The base itself was around 70 lbs. Photos later obtained in litigation, including one the facility itself had posted to its own social media a year earlier, showed the equipment rusted, missing a wheel on its base, and lacking the locking mechanism that was supposed to hold the pole in place.

None of that stopped staff from leaving it out where children played. None of that stopped an adult counselor, when she saw the kids struggling to move it, from helping them continue rather than telling them to stop. As the two children and the counselor tried to maneuver the broken equipment across the court, the pole detached from its base — not for the first time that morning. As one of the children lifted the pole again, it slipped loose and the base came down on our client’s left foot. The rusted, sharp edge of the equipment severed her big toe.

The Life-changing Injuries Received

Our client sustained serious injuries and years of medical treatment which included:

• Emergency amputation of the remainder of her big toe
• Months of physical therapy relearning how to walk without it
• A second surgery years later to fuse and straighten toes that had begun curling under from the added strain
• A serious infection and allergic reaction to surgical hardware that left her in an active infected state for two months, walking with a cane at fourteen
• A third surgery to remove that hardware once the infection cleared

By the time our client had turned eighteen, she was living with permanent nerve pain, disfigurement, and mobility limitations she will carry for the rest of her life.

The Lawsuit Against The Facility

Hailey | Hart  filed suit on her behalf asserting three theories of liability against the facility that operated the camp:

1. Premises Liability. Under Colorado’s Premises Liability Act, landowners who invite people onto their property — including through structured programs like camps — owe a duty of care to protect those invitees from known or reasonably knowable dangers. We allege the facility knew this equipment was hazardous and left it in place anyway.

2. Negligence. Separately, we allege the facility breached basic duties of care: to train and supervise staff, to inspect playground equipment regularly, to assign only age-appropriate tasks to a twelve-year-old, and to actually supervise children while they carried out those tasks.

3. Attractive Nuisance. Because our client was a child too young to appreciate the risk posed by equipment she was instructed to interact with, we also allege the doctrine of attractive nuisance applies — placing added responsibility on a landowner who allows dangerous conditions to exist where children are known to be present.

The Court also permitted Hailey | Hart to seek punitive damages against the facility operator. This case illustrates something we see often in premises liability work: catastrophic injuries rarely come from a single failure. They come from a chain of small ones — a piece of equipment that should have been thrown away, an inspection that never happened, a child asked to do a job no child should have been asked to do, and no adult stepping in to say stop.

The Result For The Client

This case resulted in a very favorable settlement for our client that will allow her access to any medical devices and treatments she will need for her lifetime, no matter the cost.

Facilities that supervise children, such as schools, camps, or licensed childcare centers, are held to specific regulatory standards in Colorado precisely because kids can’t always recognize danger for themselves. When those standards aren’t met, the law provides a path to accountability, and to recovering the real, lasting costs of what happens when they aren’t.