When Is a Mall or an Elevator Company Responsible for a Child's Escalator Fall? A Minnesota Decision Explains the Limits

The Facts

What happened

In February 2019, six-year-old Corey Smith visited the Sea Life aquarium at the Mall of America with his father and four-year-old brother. The aquarium sits on the mezzanine level, below the mall's ground floor, and guests reach it using escalators connecting the two levels.

After the visit, the family rode an escalator up to the ground floor. Smith's father then stepped away briefly to answer a phone call. Smith and his brother stayed near the escalators, playing at the top of the down escalator. A surveillance camera captured Smith grabbing the moving handrail while standing directly behind it; the handrail briefly lifted him off the floor before he let go, and he repeated this several times. On the last occasion, he held on longer. The handrail carried him upward and then began carrying him back down while he lay prone on top of it. He looked down, lost his balance, and fell approximately 27 feet to the mezzanine floor below.

Smith sustained a concussion, a loss of consciousness, a hematoma, liver and bladder contusions, and fractures to his leg and pelvis.

In February 2022, Smith, through a guardian ad litem, sued Sea Life Minnesota LLC (which operated the aquarium) and MOAC Mall Holdings LLC (which owned and operated the mall), alleging negligence against each. He later amended his complaint to add the Otis Elevator Company, which manufactured and installed the escalator, also alleging negligence.

The litigation produced three rulings Smith challenged on appeal:

• MOAC moved for summary judgment. The district court agreed that MOAC had relinquished control over the escalator itself to Sea Life under their lease, but found that MOAC still had a duty regarding the surrounding common-area floor. The court granted MOAC's motion in part and denied it in part.
• Otis moved for summary judgment on Smith's original negligence claim, and Smith separately asked to amend his complaint again to add a claim that Otis breached a post-sale duty to warn about the escalator's risks. The district court granted Otis's motion and denied leave to add the new claim. As to Otis, the appellate issue was whether the district court properly denied leave to add the proposed post-sale-duty-to-warn claim.
• The remaining claims went to an eight-day jury trial in March 2025. The jury returned a special verdict finding that neither Sea Life nor MOAC was negligent, but that Smith's father was negligent and that his negligence was the sole direct cause of Smith's injuries. Smith moved for a new trial, which the district court denied in September 2025.

The Decision

What the court held

The Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed on all three issues, in an opinion authored by Judge Johnson (Rasmusson, Presiding Judge; Bond, Judge). See Smith v. Sea Life Minnesota, LLC, No. A25-1967 (Minn. Ct. App. Sept. 8, 2026). This opinion is nonprecedential. It is not binding authority, although it may be cited for persuasive value as permitted by Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c).

The post-sale duty-to-warn claim against Otis could not proceed

A manufacturer may have a post-sale duty to warn about a product danger, but only if four requirements are all satisfied: the seller knows or should know the product poses a substantial risk of harm; the people who would receive a warning can be identified and reasonably assumed to be unaware of the risk; a warning could be effectively communicated and acted on; and the risk is serious enough to justify the burden of warning. Because a district court may deny leave to amend a complaint when the new claim could not survive summary judgment, the question was whether Smith's evidence could satisfy this test.

The court held it could not, on two of the four requirements. On the substantial-risk requirement, an Otis representative testified that Otis escalators facilitate more than one billion rides daily worldwide and that escalator falls are extremely rare. The amendment-motion record also showed three prior over-the-side falls at the Mall of America between 1992 and 2019, all involving intoxicated adults. The court also noted that an open-atrium escalator design creates a risk tied to a building's layout, not a defect in the escalator itself, and that a post-sale duty to warn does not extend to premises or installation choices made by the property owner.

On the “unaware” element, the escalator carried a warning sign telling passengers to “Attend Children,” and the evidence showed the risk of falling from height was open and obvious to the mall and the aquarium operator. Because a manufacturer need not warn people who can reasonably be assumed to already know the risk, the district court did not err by denying leave to add the claim.

MOAC's partial summary judgment rested on the lease and undisputed evidence of control

Smith argued that MOAC retained control over the escalator itself and should not have been dismissed from that portion of the claim. The Court of Appeals reviewed this de novo and looked to the written lease between MOAC and Sea Life, which placed “exclusive control and management” of common areas with MOAC but assigned Sea Life responsibility for maintaining the “mechanical equipment,” including escalators, within its own leased premises. Diagrams attached to the lease showed the escalator from which Smith fell was inside Sea Life's leased space, not the mall's common area. The undisputed evidence also showed Sea Life alone maintained, inspected, and permitted that escalator, and that it turned the escalator off and barricaded it when the aquarium was closed — a practice distinct from how MOAC treated escalators elsewhere in the mall.

Smith did not identify any evidence creating a factual dispute about which company controlled the escalator, so the court held that MOAC's partial summary judgment was proper as a matter of law.

The new-trial motion failed on each of three grounds

Excluded evidence of other escalator incidents. Evidence of similar accidents at other times can be admissible to show notice of a dangerous condition, but only if the other incidents were substantially the same as the one in the lawsuit. The district court excluded evidence of three prior falls at the Mall of America because each involved an intoxicated adult who chose to sit or ride on the handrail — unlike an unsupervised child who grabbed the handrail apparently without intending to sit or ride on it. The court also excluded evidence of two escalator falls involving children at other properties, reasoning that expanding the case beyond this specific escalator risked confusing the jury, and noting that the jury already heard evidence bearing on general awareness of escalator misuse. The Court of Appeals held neither exclusion was an abuse of discretion.

Excluded evidence of “side curtains.” Smith also sought to introduce evidence of safety devices used elsewhere to prevent falls from open-sided escalators. The district court excluded this evidence out of concern that jurors might hold the defendants to a standard of care not recognized under Minnesota law — reasoning the Court of Appeals found consistent with prior case law addressing safety practices used in other jurisdictions. The exclusion was not an abuse of discretion.

Jury instructions and the curative instruction. The district court gave a standard pattern instruction defining foreseeability and declined to add Smith's proposed additional language, which the court found repetitive of the existing definition. Separately, after Smith's attorney suggested during closing argument that the defendants had effectively agreed Smith's father was not negligent, the court gave a brief instruction clarifying that no such agreement existed and that the jury should follow the special-verdict form. The Court of Appeals held Smith's attorney forfeited any objection to that curative instruction by agreeing it was acceptable, and that, even considered on the merits, neither ruling was an abuse of the district court's broad discretion over jury instructions.

Open Questions

What the court did not decide

The Court of Appeals did not decide whether Otis's escalator was ever defective or whether Otis had a duty to warn at the time of sale — only that Smith could not establish the elements of a post-sale duty to warn on this record. It also did not decide any general question about which party controls escalators in shopping malls; that determination depended entirely on the specific lease language and evidence in this case.

Because the court found no error in any of the challenged rulings, it did not need to reach Smith's cumulative-error argument.

Practical Takeaways

What this means for Minnesota injury claims

Several practical lessons arise from the decision:

• Control can determine the scope of a property owner's duty. Here, the lease and undisputed evidence supported the conclusion that Sea Life controlled the escalator itself. MOAC nevertheless retained a duty concerning the surrounding common area, and that portion of the case proceeded to trial.
• A post-sale duty to warn is a demanding, four-part test. All four requirements — substantial risk, unaware recipients, effective communication, and a risk serious enough to justify the burden — must be satisfied, and evidence of an obvious risk or a low incident rate can defeat the claim.
• “Substantially similar” incident evidence has real limits. Prior accidents involving different circumstances — different age groups, different conduct, or different locations — may be excluded even when they seem related on the surface.
• A jury can attribute fault entirely to someone who is not a defendant. Here, the jury found a parent's own negligence was the sole cause of his child's injuries, which can eliminate recovery against the parties actually sued.
• Objecting strategy matters at trial. Agreeing that a proposed curative instruction is “acceptable” in the moment can forfeit the right to challenge it on appeal.

Related reading from Andrade Law:

• our overview of premises liability and property owner negligence claims, where the first question is often who controlled the place where the injury happened
• how children's injury and minor victim claims are brought on a child's behalf, including the role of a guardian ad litem
• our case note on Schafer v. Oakwood Community Church, where a child's injury on another organization's property turned on whether the harm was foreseeable
• our case note on Odegaard v. 610 MOB Partners, where a fall on commercial property came down to what the property owner knew about the hazard
• our case note on Mach v. LPG & NH3 Supply, where a failure-to-warn claim about a product survived summary judgment because the causation evidence conflicted

Case Information

Case information