77 Pa. Super. 515 | Pa. Super. Ct. | 1921
Opinion by
The plaintiff instituted this action against the defendant to recover damages for'the death of her husband by reason of the unlawful conduct and negligence of the defendant. The facts are not in material dispute. On April 21, 1920, about seven o’clock in the evening the plaintiff’s husband while on the pavement of Toronto Street suddenly fell backward and was picked up by friends, taken to a hospital in a patrol wagon and died the following day from causes described by a coroner’s jury and attending physicians of the hospital, as a fracture of the base of the skull with concussion of the brain. There is no challenge to the fact that the immediate cause of death was the fracture of the skull with the resultant concussion of the brain, induced by the fall on the pavement. We are more directly concerned as to the proximate cause of this fall. The evidence shows that the deceased was about sixty years of age. He had been continuously at work for twenty-one months without losing a day, at wages ranging from thirty to thirty-five dollars per week, of which he gave his wife ten to fifteen dollars a week. For about a week preceding his death he was not working on account of having sore eyes and during that time he was drinking heavily. The defendant was a licensed saloonkeeper and well acquainted with the deceased as he was frequently in his place of business at Twenty-first and Toronto streets, Philadelphia. The record of the three days immediately prior to the death of plaintiff’s husband is important and is given by a number of witnesses. On Monday, the nineteenth, at 8 o’clock in the morning, the deceased requested the defendant’s barkeeper to cash a fifty dol
The order of the court below is reversed. The verdict is reinstated and judgment is directed to be entered thereon.