The Pro Se plaintiff Tannia Winston tried her personal injury case on her own against 7-Eleven. She claimed that she was injured due to a slip and trip at defendant’s convenience store. The issue in Winston v. 7-Eleven, Inc., 2025 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 1705 (App. Div. Sept. 18, 2025) was whether the trial court properly granted the defendant’s motion for an involuntary dismissal at the end of plaintiff’s case at trial.
Plaintiff commenced her lawsuit with counsel. However, her attorney was relieved as counsel before the trial. Therefore, plaintiff represented herself at the trial of this matter.
Plaintiff’s injury occurred when she entered a 7-Eleven in Jersey City on a rainy day to purchase a cup of coffee. She claimed that, as she entered the store, her foot was caught under a large “object on the floor.” She testified that she fell forward, stiffened up, and locked her knee to avoid falling. She also claimed that an employee “quickly grabbed the object and ran it [sic] out of the building.” Plaintiff further testified that she limped out of the store, boarded a bus to the emergency room, where a cast was placed on her leg. She did admit upon cross-examination that it was actually a knee immobilizer.
At the conclusion of her testimony, plaintiff rested her case and 7-Eleven moved for an involuntary dismissal. The defendant argued that plaintiff had failed to satisfy her burden of proving liability. In particular, defendant argued that plaintiff failed to demonstrate “there was a condition in the store that was unreasonably dangerous” or that the defendant’s store was on notice of “whatever condition” plaintiff claimed caused her to trip. Further, defendant argued that plaintiff failed to demonstrate the accident was the proximate cause of her alleged damages.
Plaintiff argued that defendant knew the object was on the floor because an employee grabbed it and commented to her about its improper placement at the entrance. Plaintiff did not present any witnesses to testify about the object’s placement or duration at the entry. She claimed that the judge forbade her from explicitly testifying she tripped on “cardboard” because she was unable to present expert testimony concluding that the object was cardboard.
The trial court judge granted the defendant’s motion for a dismissal. The trial court judge found that plaintiff had failed to establish that the defendant 7-Eleven “knew or should have known of this alleged dangerous condition and failed to use a reasonable degree of diligence and care with respect to whatever the object was.”
The trial court commented that the plaintiff was unable to tell the jury what object caused her to slip and there was no testimony about how long it was there or who put it there. Even though someone from 7-Eleven may have removed it after her incident, the trial court judge found that it did not establish that 7-Eleven was responsible for the placement of that object, how long it had been there or that they knew it was there and “they were not exercising reasonable care in their failure to remove it.”
Upon appeal, the Appellate Division noted that to prove a negligence claim in the context of a business invitee’s fall at a defendant’s premises, the plaintiff “must prove by a preponderance of the evidence: (1) defendant’s actual or constructive notice of a dangerous condition; (2) lack of reasonable care by defendant; (3) proximate causation of plaintiff’s injury; and (4) damages.”
The Appellate Division further noted that owners of premises were generally not liable for injuries caused by defects for which they had no actual or constructive notice and no reasonable opportunity to discover them. The Court stated that the absence of notice would be fatal to a plaintiff’s claims of premises liability. Further, the Appellate Division noted that the “mere occurrence of an incident causing an injury is not alone sufficient to impose liability.”
Here, the Court found that the record supported the judge’s decision that plaintiff had failed to produce any evidence demonstrating that the defendant had actual or constructive notice of the condition that allegedly caused her to trip. The Appellate Division also rejected the plaintiff’s claims that the trial court had refused to grant a continuance to allow her to produce witnesses and found that she failed to produce any evidence that the trial court judge instructed her what words were allowed for her to state and what she could not state during the trial.
Hence, the Appellate Division affirmed the trial court’s dismissal of the lawsuit.
