A Georgia court began hearing arguments in the wrongful death lawsuit of John Bernecker. In July 2017, Bernecker, a stuntman for the American Movie Channel (AMC), was doing a scene for the network’s popular The Walking Dead series. The scene involved Bernecker falling over twenty feet. It went awry and during the fall, Bernecker missed the protective padding. He later died from the head injuries and his parents, Hagen and Susan, filed a wrongful death suit against AMC.
The Walking Dead stuntman suit was guaranteed to be high-profile and the Bernecker family was able to get Jeff Harris as their attorney. Harris previously represented the family of Sarah Jones, a camera assistant for Midnight Rider, who died on set 6 years ago.
The parties were unable to settle out of court, with AMC firmly insisting that there is nothing wrong with their safety procedures or their implementation. The network maintains that the accident was an isolated tragedy and not part of systematic negligence.
Furthermore, AMC argues that Bernecker made mistakes on the set that caused him to miss the protective padding on his fall. He grabbed a nearby rail, something that altered the trajectory of the scripted fall and caused him to hit the concrete floor.
“For reasons that no one can explain, he grasped the rail and held on,” defense attorney David Dial told the court. “Unfortunately, the evidence will show that John Bernecker made a mistake…”
Harris responded that the AMC production team had been “complacent” in their safety precautions and that “there was just a failure to plan for anything other than complete success.”
The interpretation of negligence is an issue in this facet of the case. Negligence involves an evaluation of what a reasonable and prudent person would have done in a given situation. Bernecker would not be expected to have been perfect in his execution of the fall. AMC would not be expected to be perfectly prepared for every possible tragedy.
Jurors will decide whose actions fit the “reasonable and prudent” and whose stepped outside those boundaries. To that end, Bernecker’s family brought forth colleagues who testified to his excellence on the job. Members of The Walking Dead team testified to the thoroughness of the precautions that were taken and that the nature of this particular fall could not have been reasonably foreseen.
An X-factor in this case involves whether AMC is even the right defendant. The company argues not; they outsourced production of the show to Stalwart Films. If it’s determined that the latter is the company responsible, then the entire case moves under Georgia’s state workers’ compensation system.
That would be a considerable blow to Harris’ efforts to get a hefty award for the Bernecker family. He won over $11 million in the Sarah Jones case. AMC is a multi-billion dollar company; Stalwart Films is considerably more modest.