Jury awards $9 million to disabled tenant who was denied parking at luxury condos

A federal jury in Los Angeles decided Thursday that a disabled Long Beach woman was owed $9.25 million in damages after they found she was for years systematically denied an accessible parking space at her beachfront condominium.

The plaintiff, Emma Adams, a tenured biology professor at Compton College, in 2017 moved into the Aqua Towers, a set of luxury high rises in Downtown Long Beach.

Due to her paraplegia, Adams uses a motorized wheelchair and a modified car equipped with a retractable ramp that extends eight feet out of the passenger side.

According to Adams’ attorney, only 72 spaces of the nearly 1,000 parking spots at the complex are wide enough to accommodate the modified car — 19 of which are reserved for handicapped parking.

But for three years, Adams was denied a handicapped space, according to court filings. Denials came from the building’s handlers, FirstService Residential, who manages the property, and later by the homeowners association at Aqua, Aqua 388 Community Association and Aqua Maintenance Association.

Adams wrote letters, emails and even went before association board meetings to plead her case. She asked for proper enforcement of parking rules, as tenants parked in those handicapped spaces without the proper placard or plate.

“But they all said no,” said Brian Olney, a trial attorney with civil rights firm Hadsell Stormer Renick & Dai LLP, who represented Adams.

At one HOA board meeting, a member suggested that Adams sell her home and leave, according to Olney.

“‘That if she didn’t like it, she should just sell and leave, sell her apartment and go,’” he said.

It wasn’t until 2020 that Adams was afforded a parking space — two years after she filed a complaint through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Except that spot wasn’t reserved — other disabled residents could also park there. According to her attorney, Adams made a habit of weeknights, spending up to three hours waiting for a handicapped spot to become available.

“Sometimes she would eat dinner inside her car,” Olney said.

Federal officials with HUD eventually sued the apartment complex’s handlers in 2023 for violating the federal Fair Housing Act but dismissed the claims in exchange for a consent decree in January that those managing Aqua Towers would provide sensitivity training to all of its employees and provide a parking space to Adams.

Within days of finding out the government planned on settling its claims, Adams interceded in her own case, hiring a private firm that took it to trial.

In her testimony at trial, Adams detailed the effects of it all on her mental health: She became socially withdrawn. She stopped seeing friends. One of her colleagues called in a welfare check, out of concern for Adams’ well-being.

“This was bullying, this was just cruel and absolutely heinous conduct,” Olney said.

Following a one-week trial in Los Angeles, the jury awarded Adams $4 million in emotional distress damages and another $5.25 million in punitive damages against the two HOAs and FirstService.

Representatives from HUD declined to comment on the verdict.

According to federal court filings, the defendants have denied any wrongdoing in the matter. An attorney representing FirstService did not respond with a statement in time for publication.

“There were so many opportunities for the defense in this case to do the right thing and to follow the law and they just refused to do so over and over again,” Olney said.

In a statement following the decision last week, Adams said she was relieved by the court’s decision but left frustrated by the government’s handling of her case. She thanked jurors and scolded her fellow tenants who she felt were complicit in the years she fought for the parking space.

“Disability rights are human rights,” Adams wrote. “Holding defendants who intentionally discriminate accountable is the true deterrent that serves the public interest. When corporations promote and enable their employees who break the law and discriminate against protected classes of people instead of reprimanding them, it only encourages those individuals and others to do it again.”

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