IN - Grandfather charged in cruise ship death of toddler Chloe Wiegand #4

[Lilibet]

As others have said, I believe he sought out this family in their time of grief, and convinced them that someone else was to blame - the cruise line. In his very first press conference, he came right out and said that all he does is sue cruise lines! His entire practice exists simply to extort money from the deepest pockets possible.

I appreciate your first hand knowledge and opinion.

Winkleman strikes me as a hustler. You don’t get as far as he has 12 years out of law school without a lot of self-promotion. He has appeared over 100 times on TV and has won some large settlements, of which he takes a portion. No doubt some of his cases had merit, but not this one.

https://www.lipcon.com/maritime-attorneys/michael-winkleman/

Unfortunately, the Wiegand family continues to be willing or deluded participants in Winkleman’s shakedown of Royal Caribbean, as we have seen from recent articles. The only beneficiary of this scam will be Winkleman, who, win or lose, can just move on to the next distraught client, leaving the Wiegands to deal with the bitter truth somehow. I don’t know how he sleeps at night!

Grandfather offered plea deal in girl's cruise ship death as Puerto Rico TV show airs video

 

[JulieBEMT]

I appreciate your first hand knowledge and opinion.

Winkleman strikes me as a hustler. You don’t get as far as he has 12 years out of law school without a lot of self-promotion. He has appeared over 100 times on TV and has won some large settlements, of which he takes a portion. No doubt some of his cases had merit, but not this one.

Michael A. Winklemanm | LMAW, P.A.

Unfortunately, the Wiegand family continues to be willing or deluded participants in Winkleman’s shakedown of Royal Caribbean, as we have seen from recent articles. The only beneficiary of this scam will be Winkleman, who, win or lose, can just move on to the next distraught client, leaving the Wiegands to deal with the bitter truth somehow. I don’t know how he sleeps at night!

Grandfather offered plea deal in girl's cruise ship death as Puerto Rico TV show airs video

My guess would be on high thread count sheets in a very expensive house.

 

[Lilibet]

My guess would be on high thread count sheets in a very expensive house.

No doubt!

 

[SpanishInquisition]

Pardon my misunderstanding. More than one poster stated her head size may have factored into the her "falling" and that's really reaching imo. . So "motive" was not the not the only factor. I never read a thing about the motive being related to any possible disability. ( not doubting what you say, I just missed that point somehow).
I think some people just wanted to express their feeling that her head looked odd to them. That's the "motive" I sense behind some of the posts.

Mass, shape and inertia are quite relevant in a case involving a fall. Toddlers in general are top-heavy and both the shape of Chloe and the shape of SA potentially factor into it. The shape of Chloe's head/body matters given how it's stated Chloe was leaning forward at the time, while it is also relevant to SA too since we see SA leaning forward and he says he was too. A big dispute is how far or whether she was out the window immediately prior. If her body wasn't fully out the window, then you're looking at both SA's shape - like with his belly pushing Chloe forward - and Chloe's shape and center and gravity - her top-heavy body being pushed forward while leaning forward. Unless and until there's a clear video showing her fully out the window prior to the fall, the exact nature of the fall is going to be talked about and discussed, so you're going to be looking at the contributing factors that went into the fall and how that contributes to whether or how reckless SA was.

Consider this - if Chloe was on the wooden railing with her entire body inside but with legs at downward angle due to the differences in height between the railing and the sill, Chloe's top-heaviness could be used to argue SA's innocence with SA thinking the window was closed while Chloe's center of gravity and downward angle sent her out the window without him doing anything to actively put her out the window. It looks like she was on the metal window sill with at least some of her out of the window to me rather than the wooden railing, but such matters could determine guilt or innocence.

 

[neesaki]

I wasn’t trying to be unkind, I was wondering if she might have had a medical condition. In some of the photos I have seen her waist looks very petite and tiny but her head looks large by comparison.

One of the donation accounts set up does specifically state funds to help pay for medical bills.

 

[mickey2942]

I agree that’s why links to MSM are helpful.

MSM has not been even factual in this case, if we had taken Winkleman's initial response, that basically indicated that Chloe had crawled to an open window by the play area and fallen out.

I am not taking anything from MSM as "factual" in this situation.

 

[Chikkamma]

RSBM

This is the exact angle Winkleman is pushing.
If the windows weren’t openable then Chloe would still be alive, maybe injured but alive.
IMO this will earn them the BIG bucks.

Respectfully disagree. A toddler could easily sustain one of several life-ending injuries by falling 4 feet downwards off of a railing onto a hard wooden floor.

Also, a previous poster beautifully explained, using examples of maritime caselaw and previous litigation against cruise ships, why the family’s civil suit against RCCL will go nowhere. I will try to find it and repost- it is really quite informative.

 

[BetteDavisEyes]

MSM has not been even factual in this case, if we had taken Winkleman's initial response, that basically indicated that Chloe had crawled to an open window by the play area and fallen out.

I am not taking anything from MSM as "factual" in this situation.

How many times have we seen that the family group included Chloe's two siblings? This misnomer has been mentioned here several times with accompanying (inaccurate) media sources. The 10-year-old brother is Chloe's only sibling as indicated in her obituary that, presumably, was written by her parents.

View Chloe Wiegand's Obituary on kpcnews.com and share memories

...Left to cherish Chloe's memory are her parents, Alan and Kimberly and brother, Wyatt Amm, all of Granger; maternal grandparents, Salvatore and Patti Anello, of Niles, Michigan, and Scott and Annie Schultz, of Zelienople, Pennsylvania; and paternal grandparents, Thomas and Mary Ann Wiegand, of Angola, Indiana...

 

[Chikkamma]

RCCL CHANCES OF SETTLING

I addressed this in one of the previous threads so I'm not going to go too in depth into this, but the chances of RCCL settling out of court for this is close to, if not actually 0. Why? Because of precedent.

The burden of proof, in this case, that the plaintiffs have to meet is was RC negligent in that they didn't know/predict that SA would put the child in the window and drop her from the 11th deck, and take steps that would have prevented him from doing it. The answer is that no, the Wiegands will never be able to prove that.

For one thing, the claim in the suit that the ship is in violation of regulations is bunk. They are trying to hold the cruise ship to building/hotel standards, not seagoing vessel standards. While they say that cruise ships are basically "floating hotels" the safety codes and regulations between the two are very different for very obvious reasons, they are in no way the same. All that RC has to do is to provide coast guard and other agency inspection reports showing that those windows are in full compliance with current applicable regulations and that argument is tossed.

For another, there has never been a child under the age of about 13-15 who has gone overboard/out of a window going back some 30 years of records. An online database going back to 1995 and listing all incidents of passengers/staff going overboard on commercial passenger vessels (cruise ships and ferrys) Chloe is the ONLY small child. The only other child listed is a 7-year-old involved in a suicide in which the mother took him and jumped with him. There has never been one previous incident of a child falling out of a window on a cruise ship, because most people have enough common sense to keep them away from them. No one else has ever needed to be warned to not put a child into the window on a cruise ship, so why would they have ever thought SA would have needed to be protected from himself? The standards they are claiming were set because children had fallen out of hotel/building windows, but since that hasn't happened on a cruise ship there isn't any reason to say that RC should be following those ones instead of the ones already in place. Cruise Passengers Overboard

And of course, RC already has clear safety instructions that passengers are issued prior to even showing up at the docks that SA ignored, stating that it's dangerous to sit/stand/climb on the railings. He was provided with those instructions prior to boarding and ignored them, putting her on the other side of said railing. By violating that set rule he takes on 100% of the blame.

As far as I can see, my opinion, there is absolutely NO CASE against the cruise line and absolutely no reason they or their insurer would settle in this instance. This case will probably be dismissed because they are suing on inapplicable standards or if it even goes to trial will be decided in RC favor, just as countless other lawsuits blaming them for people going overboard have been.

I am reposting this so others can read.

Kindred- thank you for taking the time to write this post. It is incredibly informative and gives me so much more insight into how this case may unfold.

 

[Midwestmom2019]

Edited as I have NO idea how this post showed up under my name. Not information I posted.

HACKER?

 

[JulieBEMT]

HACKER?

It could just be because I was working on my second post in this group, and did something wrong. LOL

 

[BeachSky]

This is interesting... the father when they ask him about Sam.
Camera pans to Wink watching every word that comes out of their mouths.
So now Wink is saying if the windows had been updated with a -four inch opening lock- Chloe would still be here. He’s not throwing spaghetti to see what sticks , it’s more like sheets of lasagne sliding down the wall! I’m just....?
Parents suing Royal Caribbean say cruise line played "major role" in daughter's death

MOO

 

[Barnabas]

If grandpa hadn’t been stupid Chloe would still be here.

 

[Arkay]

Remember when Michael Jackson dangled his baby son Blanket over the railing of his balcony? There was such an uproar because it was insane and the baby
could have fallen?
Different circumstance I know, on a balcony and no question of window/no window.
My point is only that no thinking adult hangs a baby or toddler over a railing, out a window, or any other kind of circumstance where death could be imminent with one false move.
I don't remember much about physics or head size or trajectory or angles or velocity, I just know the big one, gravity. SA's testimony is proven materially false in a) that he thought the window was closed and b) it was a children's play area and ergo should have had extra precautions taken. That's all that matters, IMO.
Also IMO I see no sinister motive here, just recklessness and negligence. SA and Chloe appear to have had a close relationship. He isn't her natural grandfather, he lives in another state, she could hardly have been a burden on his life.
I wonder if SA had any children of his own? Not deriding step-parents in any way! Just wondering if maybe at his age he had not had enough experience with little children? While he seems close to Chloe, she had other grandparents and he may have only seen her sporadically since they lived in Indiana and he lived in Michigan, I believe. What is his relationship with Wyatt, the brother? Was he married to Kim's mother when Kim was young?
Just rambling, trying to imagine how an adult could do this. Obviously Michael Jackson was nuts in many ways, but for the purpose of this topic I'm hearkening back to his one foolish moment of dangling his baby.

 

[Chikkamma]

I wonder how he might try to explain the discrepancy between his emphatic “I thought there was glass” statement and the video clearly showing him leaning through the window and looking down. It could get interesting.

IMO he’s already told us how he will explain it per his interview with David Begnaud... “the glass was further out than I expected”. He reasonably [sarcasm] believed that particular window to be an aquarium bubble with that particular piece of glass farther out than all the others. Time 2:54...

I dare say we’re being prepped for a “depth perception issues” defense (as others have suggested)! Let’s add it to the list of the many other ailments grandpa claims to have which would make one question why he was tasked with watching a toddler in the first place.

 

[beatrixpotter]

Head & Body Weight? A Binary Decision

Medical condition or not, seems what previous posts described is a big toddler head being heavy in relation to body weight. Does it matter whether she was a butterball or painfully thin?

Once he stuck his head out/thru window, SA was not doing calculations dependent on locations of ounces of body weight and degrees of angles to make decisions about placing her somewhere.

He faced a binary decision: suspend Chloe over a 100+ ft drop, or not. He made the wrong choice. jmo.

Way to totally miss the point. I'm only defending her appearance against people basically claiming she looked possibly deformed. It had literally NOTHING to do with what her grandfather chose to do nor was I claiming it did. I just said she didn't look like she had macrocephaly. I can't believe I need to even defend that.

 

[LLC]

Ugh it all sucks from all sides.....

I think he picked her up high to get her legs over the railing to touch the glass (no reasons are good) and then released one hand to do whatever and boom.



I truly hesitate and hate to say this but as loving as my own dad is/was with my kids, I can see how something like this could happen (I never let my kids alone as young ones because....) a split moment terrible decision when one thinks they doing something "fun" etc.

Ugh.

 

[Midwestmom2019]

The part that's the most chilling in the video is when SA leans his head outside of the window and looks downward.
As if he was gauging the distance to the concrete dock below.

Purposeful, and not in the least 'confused and befuddled'.... " I thought there was glass..." He said in the video, slapping his knee several times for emphasis.

What on God’s green earth could he have been thinking after sticking his body out of the window, looking at the view, the distance to the deck? Instead of thinking wow, long way down, better not get close to edge, he does the exact opposite: lifts Chloe up, then adjusts her so that she’s even closer to danger by sitting her in the window track.

We don’t need an answer that he wasn’t thinking. He was thinking, but what? Dangerous enough he lifts her up, but to put her outside of the window? Her view would not have been any better outside of the window, than sitting/standing on the hand railing 6 inches from window opening. She could look out, down, side to side. Forget the banging on glass story. Obviously a lie bc he knows there was no window.
So he was playing with her? Like LE said? Besides Michael Jackson, very early on one poster said he caught his nephew while on a boating excursion with his brother that could have ended tragically. Their mom was livid at the stupidity.
Chloe was wearing hearing protection at a game in one photo. So safety was a concern within her family. But maybe that was bc SA’s wife was next to them at that game?
Another adult to supervise him? He’s not safety conscious. Speeding. Seatbelts. Wonder what else he’s been involved in that disregards common sense safety issues. Maybe his driving record would indicate other driving issues. That were deferred with a fine. And not showing up in the record. Don’t know but SOMETHING is so not right here. This is such a common sense dangerous situation based on the measurements as we now know them to be.
What are we missing here? We’ve discussed just about every reason for his actions with Chloe that day. And thereafter.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

 

[al66pine]

Appearance? Not Relevant imo

Way to totally miss the point. I'm only defending her appearance against people basically claiming she looked possibly deformed. It had literally NOTHING to do with what her grandfather chose to do nor was I claiming it did. I just said she didn't look like she had macrocephaly. I can't believe I need to even defend that.

@beatrixpotter

Appearance was beside the point, imo. <--- Point of my earlier post, so will try to move past this topic.

If ppl want to continue discussing her appearance (non-issue, imo), they are free to do so.

 

[fabvab]

Why did SA even think Chloe would want a better view of the dock than she had? She might want a better view of another ship or to look at the water. But the dock?