“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Judge Frederica A. Massiah-Jackson said during a pause in Friday’s contempt-of-court proceedings, at which eight SEPTA employees turned over reams of documents relating to the November 1996 escalator accident that tore a 4-year-old’s foot off.
Witness after witness testified that nobody from SEPTA’s legal department had ever asked for the documents, which were requested by the boy’s lawyer but never produced during discovery; some of the papers turned up in the middle of the trial, at which Shareif Hall, now 7, and his mother won a jury verdict of $51 million.
