Marisa Laserna v. BW Ventana LLC and South Oxford Management LLC (No. 05-21-01191; February 16, 2024) involved a personal injury claim arising from alleged exposure to toxic mold. She rented an apartment from landlord in July 2019 and began feeling ill. On June 1, 2020 she visited a hospital emergency room with breaching difficulties, after having notified the management company of possible mold in her apartment a few days earlier. At the ER she complained of mold exposure and was diagnosed with conditions associated with mold. She sought treatment again in December 2020, also complaining of mold exposure, followed by trips to a clinic on July 31, 2020 and to a lab for mycotoxin and mold testing on August 3, 2020. The following January, Plaintiff’s counsel sent a demand letter to defendants laying out the events described above. Plaintiff eventually filed suit against her landlord and landlord’s management company on June 6, 2022. Defendants moved for summary judgment and asserted the affirmative defense of limitations. The trial court granted the motion and dismissed the case. Plaintiff appealed.
The court of appeals affirmed. Defendants argued that Plaintiff’s cause of action at the latest accrued on June 1, 2020, when she first sought treatment for mold exposure at the ER. Plaintiff countered that under the discovery rule her cause of action did not accrue until August 3, 2020, when she received the test results showing the presence of mycotoxins and toxic mold in her body. The court agreed with Defendants. The two-year statute of limitations in personal injury actions runs from the date the claimant acquires knowledge of the injury, which “triggers the putative claimant’s duty to exercise reasonable diligence to investigate the problem” (citations omitted). Further, a claimant may have knowledge of the injury “even if the claimant does not know the specific cause of the injury or its full extent” (citations omitted). The discovery rule can extend the accrual date based on the date “the plaintiff knew or should have known of the wrongfully caused injury” (citation omitted). But the rule “does not turn on whether the injured person knows the exact identity of the tortfeasor or all of the ways in which the tortfeasor was at fault in causing the injury” (citation omitted).
Examining the record, the court of appeals determined that Plaintiff’s cause of action accrued on or prior to June 1, 2020, when the undisputed evidence showed that “[Plaintiff] … knew about her breathing problems and attributed them to an exposure to mold in her apartment, precluding the application of the discovery rule to extend the accrual of her cause of action beyond that date” (citations omitted). It thus affirmed summary judgment and dismissed the case.
While this case doesn’t break new ground, we feature it here because of its proper application of the discovery rule. It’s easy to overlook the importance of “routine” applications of the law, especially where dispositive motions are concerned. We have certainly seen enough examples of trial courts not doing that and forcing courts of appeals to clean up afterwards. Fortunately, this is not one of those examples.
