238 Pa. 376 | Pa. | 1913
Opinion by
The first complaint of the appellant is that the court below permitted Louis A. Drexler to testify as to the value of plaintiff’s property taken in the opening of a street in the Borough of Braddock known as “Wood Way.” He is the husband of the plaintiff, and objection was made to his competency, for the reason that he had not shown sufficient knowledge of the market value of real estate in the vicinity of the property taken to enable him to testify as to its value and the damages which his wife sustained by the opening of the street. Before he was permitted to express an opinion as to the value of his wife’s property before and after it was taken for street purposes, he had testified, in reply to questions asked in chief and on cross-examination, that he had lived in Allegheny County twenty-eight or twenty-nine years and had known the property in question dur: ing all that period; that from the time of his marriage, in 1898, he had managed this property for his wife and had been collecting the rents from it; that she had thirteen properties in Braddock in the same neighborhood; that from 1901 to 1904 he had lived in the Borough of Braddock, on a property located on a street next to the one on which the property in this case is situated, and had sold the same to a hospital; that he had managed his wife’s properties for her and collected the rents from them ever since his marriage; that he had a knowledge of the value of real estate in the borough; that though he had moved to Delaware in 1904, he had made frequent visits to Braddock and had kept in touch with the value of properties there, and that he and his wife had sold to the Schuylkill Land Improvement Company the rear end of the property involved in this issue. The witness was so clearly competent for the purpose for which he was called that we dismiss the first assignment of error without further comment.
The second assignment calls for a reversal of the judgment. Edward M. Brackmeyer was called as a
The remaining complaint of the appellant is of the court’s instruction to the jury as to an allowance which might be made to the plaintiff by way of compensation for the delay to which she was subjected in recovering her damages. Plaintiff’s seventh point was properly affirmed, but in that portion of the general charge which is the subject of the' fourth assignment the trial judge used words that were liable to misconstruction by the jury. After telling them that there was no evidence of unreasonable delay in bringing the case to trial, he added: “There has been no evidence of that fact except so far as the argument of counsel is concerned.” This
The second and fourth assignments of error are sustained and the judgment is reversed with a venire facias de novo.