At 2 years old, a Baltimore boy who recently won an historic $6 million judgment against a landlord for not removing hazardous paint chips from his home was healthy and happy.
But six years later, he has fallen behind in school, reading below grade level, prompting his mother to sue for the effects of a high level of lead in his blood ? the result of exposure to chipped paint in a rented East Baltimore row home.
On Wednesday, his lawyers said the largest award for a single child in a lead poisoning case in the city ? against Regional Management, a Baltimore-based property management firm ? was justified.
“The injury is permanent brain damage in an 8-year-old who already has problems in school is pretty serious,” the boy?s attorney, Bruce Powell, said of the jury?s award made this week.
Powell said Regional Management was negligent because it failed to remove hazardous paint after the child?s family notified maintenance workers at Garden Village Apartments in Cedonia about chipped paintin their home six months before he was diagnosed with lead poisoning.
Powell also said that despite tests by the Baltimore City Health Department that confirmed lead hazards in the home, the defendant did not adequately abate the hazardous paint.
But lawyers for the plaintiff claim the child was not poisoned at their client?s apartment.
“He was exposed to lead at a home that his father lived in,” said Charles Joseph, lawyer for Regional Management Co.
“The health department tried to inspect [the father?s home] but couldn?t. We filed a motion to have it inspected but the court never ruled on it.”
Lead poisoning causes brain damage, particularly in children under the age of 6, by retarding the development of the prefrontal cortex ?-the area of the brain that controls decision making and long-term thinking.
Several studies have shown that early childhood lead poisoning greatly enhances the risk for impulsive or criminal behavior, learning disabilities and drug addiction.
Children in Baltimore City have been hit particularly hard by lead poisoning. In 2006 nearly two thirds of all children in Maryland who had lead levels of 10 micrograms per deciliter ? the threshold over which the state considers a child to be poisoned ? lived inthe city.
A 2003 report by the Abell Foundation estimated 106,000 homes in Baltimore have potentially hazardous levels of lead paint, a number the report concluded raises the risk of new cases of lead poisoning significantly in the city.
The Maryland Department of the Environment?s latest report on lead poisoning throughout the state shows 1,274 of the roughly 100,000 children tested had elevated levels of lead in 2006; 843 of those children lived in Baltimore City.
