Fred Queller, a lawyer who successfully argued in an influential domestic violence case that the refusal of police officers in a Bronx precinct to protect a woman against her violent estranged husband led to his brutal stabbing of their 6-year-old daughter, died on Sept. 21 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93.
His daughter Jessica Queller confirmed the death.
In 1976, Mr. Queller filed an $11 million civil lawsuit against the City of New York on behalf of Dina Sorichetti, a daughter of Josephine and Frank Sorichetti. The suit accused police officers of failing to act against Mr. Sorichetti in November 1975, despite his wife’s order of protection against him, their knowledge of his earlier violent incidents, and his past threats, including one to kill his wife and daughter, which he made the day before the stabbing.
When he failed to return Dina to her mother after his court-ordered weekend visitation — a violation of the protective order — Mr. Sorichetti attacked her in his apartment with a fork, a knife and a screwdriver. The assault left her in a pool of blood from wounds to her chest, back, stomach and right leg; she also suffered some brain damage from blood loss.
Dina’s aunt, Mr. Sorichetti’s sister, who shared the apartment with him, found her and called the police.
Mr. Sorichetti was convicted of attempted murder in 1976 and sentenced to six to 18 years in prison. Dina was frequently hospitalized to deal with her injuries.
“What is fair and reasonable compensation for the absence of a childhood?” Mr. Queller wrote in Trial Lawyers Quarterly in 1983, in an article about courts’ compensation of Dina and other victims.
“What does she have to look forward to in finding a companion and making a life for herself?” he added. “She will be constantly reminded of her mutilating scars. She will have to relive the stabbings of the night of Nov. 9, 1975, over and over again.”
A State Supreme Court jury in the Bronx awarded Dina $3 million in 1983; the court’s Appellate Division reduced the damages to $2 million a year later.
In 1985, the State Court of Appeals affirmed the $2 million award, ruling that the city, through the police, had a “special relationship” with Dina because of the order of protection and officers’ knowledge of her father’s violent history. By failing to act, Judge Fritz W. Alexander II wrote in his opinion, the city had “breached its duty to care” for Dina, and that breach was the “proximate cause” of her injuries.
Michael Dowd, the founding director of Pace Women’s Justice Center at Pace University in Manhattan, who has defended abused women who killed their husbands, said the Sorichetti opinion was “an important step for the victims of domestic violence on the obligations of a police department to take precautions to protect a woman when they have reason to believe that she may be in danger.”
Kevin Faley, a partner in the Manhattan law firm Morris Duffy Alonso Faley & Pitcoff, who wrote about the importance of the Sorichetti case in The New York Law Journal in 2011, said in an email that plaintiffs’ lawyers have used it as “precedent in cases involving an alleged failure to provide police protection.”
He added, “Sorichetti is an important case in deciding under what circumstances a municipality could be held liable to a member of the general public who was injured as a result of some negligent act by the municipality.”
Fred Queller was born on July 10, 1932, in Manhattan. His parents, Victor and Helen (Cenzer) Queller, were Polish immigrants who owned a small hardware store in Spanish Harlem, where Fred began working as a child.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in business studies from the City College of New York in 1954 and a juris doctor degree from the New York University School of Law two years later.
Mr. Queller built a career as a personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer in Manhattan, first as a solo practitioner and later as the senior trial lawyer at Queller & Fisher (now Queller, Fisher, Washor, Fuchs & Kool). He served as the president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association from 1984 to 1986.
One of his clients, Leomie Warmsley, was awarded $2 million by a jury in 1981 for multiple injuries she suffered when her husband crashed their car into a railroad support, an accident caused by defect in the street. The city had offered $250,000.
Five years later, some states were looking to reform the liability insurance system to make it more difficult for accident victims to win large sums in personal injury cases. When asked if the system needed to be fixed, Mr. Queller pivoted to his client.
“Mrs. Warmsley would be very happy to give back every dime that the jury awarded,” he said, “if there was some way the responsible party could leave her in the position she was in before these devastating injuries.”
Among the other cases Mr. Queller won was one that awarded a client $27.5 million in 1997, after a baby suffered brain damage when hospital staff members botched a spinal meningitis test; and another that resulted in an award of $46 million in 2000 for the family of a woman who died in a hospital in Brooklyn after a doctor misdiagnosed her congestive heart failure.
In addition to his daughter Jessica, Mr. Queller is survived by another daughter, Danielle Queller; two grandchildren; and a brother, Leon. His wife, Stephanie (Tarler) Queller, died in 2003.
In the 1980s, Mr. Queller’s career took a quirky turn when he and other members of the trial lawyers association started the nonprofit Big Apple Pothole and Sidewalk Corporation to encourage people to file lawsuits for broken ankles and other injuries caused by New York City’s potholes and crooked sidewalks.
The corporation was formed in response to the so-called pothole law passed by the city in 1980 to limit lawsuits. The law established that the city could not be sued for a street defect that caused an accident unless the city had been notified of the defect at least 15 days before the accident occurred.
Mr. Queller was the president of the group when it hired college students to map 750,000 sidewalk and street defects in the city’s five boroughs, which created a database that he presented to the city in 1982 offering proof that the problems existed. The group also took out newspaper advertisements encouraging other lawyers to examine the database, for a $50 fee, to determine if a particular hole or crack that caused a client’s fall was on the list.
“Our efforts will prevent people from being injured if the city repairs sidewalks and crosswalks as it promised to do when the pothole law was passed,” Mr. Queller told The Daily News in 1984. “If these repairs are not made, we will have at least provided the victims of sidewalk accidents with the ability to seek compensation for their injuries.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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