Perez v Andrews Plaza Hous. Assoc., L.P.

Perez v Andrews Plaza Hous. Assoc., L.P. 2009 NY Slip Op 09160 [68 AD3d 512] December 10, 2009 Appellate Division, First Department Published by New York State Law Reporting Bureau pursuant to Judiciary Law § 431. As corrected through Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Gladys Perez, Appellant,
v
Andrews Plaza Housing Associates, L.P., et al., Respondents.

—[*1] Law Offices of Samuel J. Lurie, New York (Dennis A. Breen of counsel), for appellant.

Curan, Ahlers, Fiden & Norris, LLP, New York (Joan L. Fiden of counsel), for respondents.

Judgment, Supreme Court, Bronx County (Alan J. Saks, J.), entered September 4, 2008, upon a jury verdict in favor of defendants, dismissing the complaint, unanimously affirmed, without costs.

The jury's verdict was supported by valid lines of reasoning and permissible inferences from the evidence at trial (see Cohen v Hallmark Cards, 45 NY2d 493, 499 [1978]), and was not against the weight of the evidence. Notwithstanding that defendants presented no direct evidence to contradict it, the jury was free to disbelieve plaintiff's testimony that she gave defendants notice of the defective door saddle that caused her to slip and fall (see PJI 1:37; Matter of Nowakowski, 2 NY2d 618, 622 [1957]). The jury could rationally have found plaintiff's testimony unbelievable in light of her admission that she never went to defendants' management office to complain in person during the three months in which she claimed her telephoned complaints were being ignored and defendants' evidence that they had responded to other, unrelated, complaints that plaintiff made in the same time period. Concur—Mazzarelli, J.P., Andrias, Saxe, Catterson and Acosta, JJ.