A motorized gate that does not reverse when it touches a child is a defective product, an unsafe premises, or both. Two clocks run: four years for the product claim, two years if the child died.
Call 904-383-7448Reviewed by Graham W. Syfert, Esq., Florida Bar No. 39104, Of Counsel to the Soud Law Firm. Last updated .
If a motorized gate or garage door crushed your child at a Florida apartment or HOA, you likely have two overlapping claims: a product-liability claim against the operator manufacturer for missing or non-functioning entrapment protection, and a premises-liability claim against the property owner, HOA, and maintenance company for letting the gate run without working photo-eyes. The deadlines differ. A product-liability personal-injury claim has four years under section 95.11(3)(d), Florida Statutes. If the child died, the wrongful-death claim has only two years under section 95.11(3)(d). General premises negligence is now two years under section 95.11(5)(a) after HB 837. A twelve-year statute of repose under section 95.031(2)(b) can bar a claim on an older gate. First steps: do not let anyone repair, replace, or remove the gate operator or its sensors, photograph everything, and get the service and HOA records before they disappear. Graham W. Syfert, Esq., is Of Counsel to the Soud Law Firm. Call 904-383-7448.
A motorized gate is supposed to stop and reverse the instant it touches a person. Since August 1, 2018, the UL 325 standard requires a slide-gate operator to have a minimum of two external monitored entrapment-protection devices, one for the open direction and one for the close direction, and the operator will not run without them. When a gate crushes a child anyway, something failed. Either the safety device was never installed, or it was bypassed, or it stopped working and nobody fixed it.
That failure usually points at two different defendants. The manufacturer of the operator faces a product-liability claim if the design or warnings were defective. The property owner, the HOA, and the maintenance company face a premises-liability claim if they ran a gate they knew, or should have known, had no working photo-eye. The same facts support both theories at once.
The deadlines are not the same, and that catches families off guard. A product-liability personal-injury claim runs four years under section 95.11(3)(d), Florida Statutes. If the child died, the wrongful-death clock is only two years under section 95.11(3)(d), Florida Statutes. The premises-negligence claim, after HB 837 took effect March 24, 2023, is two years under section 95.11(5)(a), Florida Statutes. When in doubt, treat the deadline as the shortest one that could apply.
The injury is mechanical and fast. A child stands in the path of a closing slide gate, a swinging gate, or a descending garage door. The safety system is supposed to detect the child and reverse. When it does not, hundreds of pounds of metal keep moving.
There are a few recurring patterns. A sliding gate closes laterally and pins a child against the gatepost or the fence, crushing the chest or neck. A swing gate pins a child against a wall or a parked car. A vehicular slide gate that has come off its track topples sideways and falls on a child. A garage door descends onto a child and does not stop.
The deadliest scenario is lateral entrapment. A slide gate moving toward its closed position pins the child between the leading edge of the gate and the receiving post. UL 325 calls these the entrapment zones, and the photo-eye and edge sensors exist precisely to detect a body in those zones and reverse before the force becomes lethal.
Johanna Lugo, age 12, was waiting for the school bus at the entrance to Placid Lake Townhomes, a gated community in Sanford, Florida, on January 23, 2013. She became entrapped between the bottom of the motorized gate and the curb. A neighbor found her unconscious under the partially opened gate around 9 a.m. The loss of oxygen caused hypoxic brain damage requiring constant care. The verified facts of that case illustrate the entrapment mechanism exactly.
A second pattern is structural failure of a neglected gate. When the rollers, track, or mounting hardware are not maintained, a heavy vehicular gate can leave its track and fall.
Seven-year-old Zhanaye Williams died in Tampa, Florida, when an automatic gate at her apartment-complex entrance toppled and caused a fatal crushing blow to her skull. According to tenants, the gate had been broken for at least four years and was attached to its frame by only a chain. Her brother survived and witnessed it. Her parents sued the apartment-complex owner and the management company. That is a premises case before it is ever a product case, because the danger was years of documented neglect.
Garage doors carry the longest safety history. After a wave of child deaths, federal law required residential garage-door openers made after January 1, 1993, to include entrapment protection, and photo-eyes became standard. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has reported that 46 children between the ages of two and fourteen died from March 1982 to December 1990 when they were trapped under closing garage doors.
A photo-eye knocked out of alignment, coated in dust, or partly blocked may not reverse the door. When a defective control board makes it worse, the manufacturer can be on the hook. In February 2023 the Chamberlain Group recalled LiftMaster myQ garage-door control panels because the secondary entrapment-protection system could fail and let the door close on an obstruction.
The gate-operator market runs through a handful of manufacturers. The brand and model number matter, because each operator has its own manual, its own monitored-sensor scheme, and its own documented failure points. Identifying the exact operator is the first technical step of a product case.
DoorKing is one of the most common operators at apartments and HOAs, including the 9000 series of slide-gate operators. DoorKing's own materials confirm the UL 325 framework: every DoorKing operator has built-in inherent entrapment protection, and external Type B1 photo-eye or Type B2 sensing-edge devices are required or the operator will not run. As of August 1, 2018, a DoorKing slide operator needs a minimum of two external monitored entrapment-protection devices to function under UL 325.
When a DoorKing gate crushes a child, the question is why a UL-325-compliant operator ran without working monitored sensors. The answer is often an installer or maintenance crew who bypassed the monitoring to stop nuisance shutdowns.
LiftMaster and Chamberlain are the same corporate family, the Chamberlain Group, a dominant manufacturer of both gate operators and garage-door openers. On February 9, 2023, the Chamberlain Group recalled LiftMaster myQ garage-door control panels because the secondary entrapment-protection system could fail, causing the door to close even with an obstruction present. The recall covered control panels manufactured between March 2022 and October 2022, with approximately 96,400 sold in the United States. Consumers were told to stop using them and contact Chamberlain for a free repair kit.
A recall is powerful evidence in a product case. It is the manufacturer's own admission that the safety system could fail in exactly the way that hurts people.
Nice owns the Linear and Apollo gate-operator lines and supports HySecurity operators. Nice and HySecurity materials confirm the same UL 325 7th Edition requirement effective August 1, 2018: monitored entrapment protection, with operators required to test connected sensors at least once per cycle. FAAC is a major European operator manufacturer also sold in Florida.
The recurring defect theory across all of these brands is the same. The monitoring feature that is supposed to shut the gate down when a sensor fails can be defeated, and when it is, the gate keeps closing on a beam that no longer works.
Florida adopted strict products liability in West v. Caterpillar Tractor Co., 336 So. 2d 80 (Fla. 1976), embracing section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts. A manufacturer is liable for a product that is defective and unreasonably dangerous when it leaves the manufacturer's control and causes injury, without proof of negligence.
A gate case can plead all three classic defect theories. A manufacturing defect means this particular operator left the factory different from its design, with a miswired or dead sensor circuit. A design defect means the operator's monitoring could be too easily bypassed or its sensor coverage left a gap in an entrapment zone that a reasonable alternative design would have closed. A failure-to-warn claim means the warnings and instructions did not adequately tell installers and owners how the safety system fails and how to test it.
The product-liability personal-injury claim runs four years under section 95.11(3)(d), Florida Statutes. Watch the twelve-year statute of repose under section 95.031(2)(b), Florida Statutes. Gate operators are long-lived. An operator delivered to its first purchaser more than twelve years before the injury may be beyond the repose period, which can bar the product claim outright even when the limitations clock has not run.
Most of these crushes happen on someone else's property, which adds a premises-liability claim against the people who controlled the gate. An apartment owner, a condominium association, an HOA, a property-management company, and a gate-service vendor can all share responsibility. Each may carry separate insurance.
A premises claim does not depend on a product defect. It depends on notice and neglect. If the photo-eye had been broken for months, if tenants had complained, if the gate had been off its track and chained up for years as in the Tampa case, the owner knew or should have known the gate was dangerous and let it run anyway. That is ordinary premises negligence.
After HB 837, general negligence claims accruing on or after March 24, 2023, run two years under section 95.11(5)(a), Florida Statutes. Comparative fault is governed by section 768.81, Florida Statutes, which after HB 837 bars recovery when the injured party is more than fifty percent at fault. Defendants will argue a parent should have watched the child more closely. With a young child near a gate that lacked the safety device the law requires, that argument tends to fall flat.
Because two theories run side by side, calendar the shortest applicable deadline and work backward. If the child survived, the product-liability personal-injury claim has four years under section 95.11(3)(d), Florida Statutes, while the premises-negligence claim has two years under section 95.11(5)(a). If the child died, both the product wrongful-death claim and the premises wrongful-death claim run two years under section 95.11(3)(d), Florida Statutes.
The twelve-year statute of repose in section 95.031(2)(b), Florida Statutes, is a separate bar that can extinguish a product claim even when the limitations period is open, measured from delivery of the operator to its first purchaser. There is a tolling provision when the manufacturer had actual knowledge of the defect and took affirmative steps to conceal it. Establishing the operator's delivery date early decides whether the product claim is viable.
These gates and openers serve southeast Georgia too. Georgia's strict-product-liability statute is OCGA section 51-1-11, with a ten-year statute of repose running from the first sale of the unit and a two-year personal-injury limitations period under OCGA section 9-3-33. If the injury happened in Georgia, Georgia's clocks and repose period apply.
The most important evidence is the gate operator itself, and it disappears fast. Property owners replace or repair a gate within days of a serious injury, which destroys the proof. A litigation-hold letter demanding preservation of the operator, the control board, the sensors, and the wiring should go out immediately, before anyone touches it.
The paper trail is the rest of the case. Service and maintenance records show whether the photo-eye was ever tested. Work orders and invoices show whether monitoring was bypassed. HOA board minutes and tenant complaints show notice. The operator's model and serial number, the installation date, and the UL 325 compliance documentation tie the product theory together. Public-records and discovery requests should target all of it.
The defendant pool typically includes the operator manufacturer, the installer, the gate-service vendor, the property owner, and the management company or HOA. Sorting out who controlled the gate and who carried insurance, before filing, drives both the pleading and the settlement value.
Get the operator preserved before you do anything else. The single most common way these cases die is a property manager swapping the operator within a week, leaving no defective part to inspect. Send the hold letter the day you are retained.
Photograph the entrapment zone and the sensor mounts. A photo-eye that is missing, dangling, or aimed at nothing tells the story faster than any report. Capture the model and serial numbers off the operator while you still have access.
Pull the service records and the HOA minutes. The premises case and the notice argument live in those documents. If tenants complained that the gate did not reverse and nothing was done, that is the case.
Mind which clock controls. If the child died, you are on the two-year wrongful-death clock under section 95.11(3)(d) even though the product personal-injury clock would have been four years. Do not let the longer product deadline lull a death case past two years. And check the operator's delivery date against the twelve-year repose period under section 95.031(2)(b) before you count on the product claim.
One disclosure the rules require, and that families should hear plainly. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case turns on its own facts. Graham W. Syfert, Esq., is Of Counsel to the Soud Law Firm.
If a motorized gate or garage door has crushed your child, the evidence vanishes within days. These are the first steps that protect both the product claim and the premises claim.
You likely have two. A product-liability claim against the gate-operator manufacturer if the photo-eye or auto-reverse failed, and a premises-liability claim against the apartment owner and management company if they ran a gate they knew was unsafe. The same facts support both. Call 904-383-7448 for a free consultation.
If your child survived, the product-liability personal-injury claim has four years under section 95.11(3)(d), Florida Statutes, and the premises-negligence claim has two years under section 95.11(5)(a). If your child died, the wrongful-death claim is two years under section 95.11(3)(d). Calendar the shortest one that applies.
UL 325 is the safety standard for automatic gate operators. Since August 1, 2018, a slide-gate operator must have at least two external monitored entrapment-protection devices, one for opening and one for closing, and the operator will not run without them. When a gate crushes a child, UL 325 tells you what safety device should have stopped it.
Yes. On February 9, 2023, the Chamberlain Group recalled LiftMaster myQ garage-door control panels because the secondary entrapment-protection system could fail and let the door close on an obstruction. The recall covered panels made March through October 2022, about 96,400 sold in the United States. A recall is strong evidence in a product case.
Yes. The manufacturer faces a product-liability claim if the operator's design, sensors, or warnings were defective. The HOA, property owner, and maintenance company face a premises-liability claim if they ran the gate without working photo-eyes. They are separate defendants with separate insurance, and you can pursue both.
Not necessarily, but act fast. A litigation-hold letter demanding preservation of the operator, control board, and sensors should go out immediately. If the operator is already gone, the service records, work orders, and tenant complaints still build the premises case and the notice argument.
Two years under section 95.11(3)(d), Florida Statutes, the Florida wrongful-death limitations period. Do not assume you have the four-year product window. When a gate injury causes death, the two-year wrongful-death clock controls. Call 904-383-7448.
Residential openers made after January 1, 1993, must include entrapment protection, and photo-eyes are standard. If the sensor failed to reverse, the claim can run against the manufacturer for a defect and against the property owner for neglect. A misaligned, dirty, or blocked sensor that should have worked is the center of the case.
It can. Section 95.031(2)(b), Florida Statutes, sets a twelve-year statute of repose from delivery of the operator to its first purchaser, and it can bar a product claim even when the limitations period is still open. There is a narrow tolling exception for concealed defects. Pin down the operator's delivery date early.
Yes. Georgia's strict-product-liability statute is OCGA section 51-1-11, with a ten-year statute of repose from the unit's first sale and a two-year personal-injury limitations period under OCGA section 9-3-33. If the injury happened in Georgia, Georgia's deadlines and repose period apply.
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