Phelps Roofing Company v. Johnson

PALMORE, Judge.

Mary Elizabeth English, a 27-year old colored girl, was killed when she fell to the basement from the second story of an apartment or tenement house wherein she was a social guest at a late-at-night drinking party with some of the tenants of the house. Ostensibly in search of a bathroom in the apartment of L. C. Sanders, one of the participants in the party, she mistakenly went out a door connecting one of Sanders’ two rooms with a rear hall and stairway that was in process of being dismantled and replaced by the landlords’ contractor. The stairs and railings had been…