Woman Sues Kildare’s After Falling Out of Bunk Bed Drunk — in Jail

Kildare’s Manayunk. (Photo via Google Maps)

We here at Philadelphia magazine see a heck of a lot of lawsuits come across our desk, but we’re pretty sure this is the first time that we’ve seen someone file a lawsuit against a bar for injuries sustained after getting arrested for a DUI.

Paige Kalika, 26, of Media has filed such a lawsuit against Kildare’s Manayunk, the Irish pub chain from restaurateur Dave Magrogan, who also owns the Harvest and Doc Magrogan restaurants.

According to her lawsuit, Kalika was drinking at Kildare’s Manayunk after midnight on July 19th of last year, and she claims that the bar continued to serve her even though she was visibly intoxicated, which, if true, would be a violation of the law on the bar’s part.

After leaving Kildare’s, Kalika got behind the wheel of her Honda Civic and made it all the way to Edge Hill Road in Darby — that’s more than 30 minutes away — where she hit a parked vehicle and got stuck. When the cops arrived on the scene, Kalika says that she was still so drunk that she couldn’t stand up and became ill.

The police took Kalika to Darby Police Headquarters and put her in a holding cell, where she took the top bunk of a bunk bed. Her lawsuit states that she was still so drunk that when she tried to get out of the bed, she fell and smashed her head onto the hard floor. This all happened, claims the suit, because she was “furnished, served, sold, and/or given excessive amounts of intoxicating beverages, while visibly intoxicated, at Kildare’s.”

Kalika was transported to the emergency room of a local hospital, and she says that her blood-alcohol level was found to be .23 percent, about four hours after she left Kildare’s. The legal limit in Pennsylvania is .08 percent.

Her lawsuit lists a litany of injuries and other conditions she says were caused by her fall from the bed, including a broken jaw, brain damage, concussion, disfigurement, humiliation, hallucinations and problems with her ears and eyes. She is seeking unspecified damages.

The lawsuit was brought under Pennsylvania’s Dram Shop Act, which holds that a business that provides alcohol to a visibly intoxicated person might be held liable for damage that the person causes while drunk. Such cases can be tough to win, in part “because juries often believe individuals should be ­responsible for their actions,” writes Anapol Weiss partner Miriam Barish in this Legal Intelligencer article.

As it was her first DUI offense and no one was injured while she was driving, Kalika was admitted into Pennsylvania’s ARD probation program, which offers offenders a clean slate as long as they keep their nose clean. Kalika was ordered to perform 64 hours of community service and attend Alcohol Highway Safety School, and her driver’s license was suspended for two months.

Through his publicist, Kildare’s owner Magrogan declined to comment for this article.

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