Opinion
May 9, 1995
Appeal from the Supreme Court, New York County (Francis Affronti, J.).
Plaintiff seeks to recover for personal injuries sustained when she fell on a ramp while exiting defendant's building, her theory being that the ramp was not constructed in accordance with sound engineering principles. The jury returned a verdict with interrogatories finding that defendant was negligent but that such negligence was not the proximate cause of plaintiff's injuries. Plaintiff claims that the verdict is both inconsistent and irreconcilable with a reasonable view of the evidence, and that proximate cause should have been found by the court as a matter of law. We disagree. Proximate cause is a matter generally to be resolved by the finder of fact (Derdiarian v Felix Contr. Corp., 51 N.Y.2d 308, 312), and a finding thereof does not inevitably flow from a finding of culpable conduct (Schaefer v Guddemi, 182 A.D.2d 808, 809). A jury's verdict should not be set aside as inconsistent and against the weight of the evidence as long as there is at least one fair interpretation of the evidence to support it (supra; Sancimino v Brooklyn Union Gas Co., 204 A.D.2d 298, 299), the court's disagreement with the jury's findings or unhappiness with the harshness of the result being of no consequence (Brooks v Adams, 204 A.D.2d 938). Here, in view of the fact that plaintiff had gone down the ramp on many prior occasions without falling, the jury could have fairly found that she fell on this occasion not because of any imperfections in the ramp but because she was inattentive. We have considered plaintiff's other arguments and find them to be without merit.
Concur — Sullivan, J.P., Rosenberger, Ross, Asch and Williams, JJ.