Woman suing Lowe’s for negligence testifies

The last thing Kelly Hendrickson remembers before her July 2013 fall at a Lowe’s home improvement store was “looking up at the palm trees.”

She remembers nothing more before waking up with severe pain in her head.

“My head was just killing me,” she told jurors Thursday. “It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt, and I just, was so confused.”

Hendrickson later sued Lowe’s Home Centers for negligence, and her lawyers plan to seek hefty punitive damages in the case, which went to trial last week. They said about 30 other people were injured after falling on water in Lowe’s garden centers in Clark County during the previous five years, but the company did nothing to correct the hazard.

Attorney Esther Holm, who represents Lowe’s, has said the other falls occurred at 13 different stores in Clark County. She said only three during that five-year period occurred at the Lowe’s at 5050 S. Fort Apache Road, where Hendrickson fell.

“The odds are one in a million of a slip and fall in a Lowe’s garden center in a year,” Holm told jurors last week.

Hendrickson, a 41-year-old mother of three, has not been attending the trial. She took the witness stand Thursday afternoon and said her family moved from Indiana to Las Vegas in November 2012.

She showed jurors pictures of palm trees she had sent her husband shortly before her fall. She said her head was pounding after the fall, and her back was covered in a “slimy, wet substance.”

“I just remember thinking, ‘Am I going to die?’” she testified. “I guess I just realized at that moment that I hit my head, on the concrete, and what that could do to a person. It just, it scared me to death.”

Hendrickson said she started yelling for help, but no one could hear her.

“I was just in a panic thinking, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to die. What’s going to happen to my kids? What’s going to happen to my family?”

The emotional witness said she yelled several more times before help came.

Hendrickson said she now suffers from neck pain and headaches, as well as increased anxiety and depression. She also has issues with balance, and doctors have informed her that she has forever lost her senses of smell and taste.

“You don’t realize how precious those things are to you until you’re without them,” she said.

Hendrickson said the changes have caused her to gain weight as she tries in vain to satiate her desires for certain foods.

“You want that taste of chocolate,” she explained. “You want that satisfaction of salt, and you just never get it.”

She said she no longer cooks without supervision because of the fire risk; she can’t smell smoke.

“I feel like I’m half the mom I used to be,” she said.

Clark County District Judge Ron Israel is presiding over the trial, which is expected to conclude early next week.

Contact Carri Geer Thevenot at cgeer@reviewjournal.com or 702-384-8710. Find @CarriGeer on Twitter.