First-year student Fallon Smith doesn’t recall exactly
what happened the morning of Feb. 20 at about 5 a.m., but her
roommates provided her with the details.
“My roommate told me she heard a big noise, then heard me
screaming, “˜Oh my God, oh my God.’ She looked down and
saw me bleeding and stumbling into the hall,” Smith said.
Smith had fallen off her rail-less bunk bed in Sproul Hall.
Smith was immediately rushed to the UCLA Medical Center and was
released ten hours later. Because she had landed on her face, she
had suffered cuts and bruises on the right side of her face and
developed a swollen eye which did not open for four days.
Currently, Smith and her family are considering whether to file
suit against UCLA, while the administration attempts to determine
whether the university was legally responsible for the
injuries.
The day after her injuries Smith flew to her home in San Jose
and underwent further medical examinations at Kaiser Permanente,
she said. There, she said, she was informed she had five fractures
on the side of her face and had a hole in her skull above her
eyebrow. She also had to discontinue her participation with the
UCLA women’s rowing team for the rest of the quarter due to
back problems.
Five days after the incident Smith’s nose began to bleed
again, she said. After eight and a half hours of Q-tips soaked in
codeine packed up her nose the bleeding stopped.
“I never had a bloody nose before the day I fell,”
she said.
Smith’s medical bills amounted to roughly $10,000.
UCLA will not pay the medical bills at this time because the
university said it will show that it is not responsible, Smith
said. UCLA’s Office of Insurance and Risk Management recently
hired a claims company to investigate whether UCLA was
responsible.
After the incident, Smith refused to sleep on her lofted bed.
Instead, she slept on the floor of a friend’s room in the
Hitch Suites for two weeks.
Overall, Smith has not been too satisfied with the Housing
administration’s response to her injury.
“The resident director of Sproul was nice though, making
sure that I was okay and putting me in the UCLA guest house for two
days,” Smith continued.
Housing and Office of Residential Life administrators believe
they tried to support Smith during this period.
“Whenever a student is injured in the residence halls, the
staff does whatever it can to respond and attend to the student. We
try to provide the student with whatever assistance they
need,” said ORL Director Suzanne Seplow.
The Housing Administration had a staff member in the emergency
ward with her, and ORL and Housing followed up with Smith and her
roommates to check on her condition, said Director of Housing
Michael Foraker.
“There was a lot of involvement from Housing and the
resident assistants to make sure that she was OK, and they helped
facilitate her move to a different residence building,”
Seplow said.
As there were no rooms available in the residence halls, Smith
was offered a room in either Saxon Suites or De Neve.
Due to the difference in housing costs among different residence
buildings, Smith pays $1,000 more for Saxon housing than she did
when she resided at Sproul, but Housing said that was the option
she had chosen.
“We gave her the option of staying in her room in Sproul,
a suite, or some other location, and she chose Saxon,”
Foraker said.
Smith said she did not leave UCLA Housing completely because of
the difficulty of getting out of a housing contract.
Smith was also unable to attend classes during eighth and ninth
week of the winter quarter.
Something else that upset her was that she said she was not
aware rails would be made available upon request.
However, policy 6B in the On-Campus handbook, which students are
given at the beginning of every school year, states that ladders
and guard rails for elevated beds are available upon request at the
front desks of each residence hall.
“It is always the students’ responsibility to go
through the handbook and policies of any sort. We make sure that
students get the handbook and the information is also available on
the residential life Web site,” Seplow said.
To further ensure that students know the option of a guard rail
is available to them, Housing plans to market the guard rails more
heavily by inserting flyers in check-in packets or placing table
tents on their desks, said Associate Director of Housing Alfred
Nam.
“The key is to make sure that students are aware that it
is available,” Foraker said.
Some schools, like Stanford, require lofted beds or bunk beds to
have guard rails and if students take the rails off they are
fined.
“I work in construction and workmen cannot work above six
feet without safety rails. How can they expect students to sleep
that high without safety rails?” said Leonard Smith, Fallon
Smith’s father.
Though there are laws regarding the safety of workers at a
specific height, there are no laws mandating that bunk beds must
have guard rails if they exceed a certain height.
“As far as we know, UCLA is complying with all safety
regulations,” Foraker said.
Additionally, the response UCLA has received through meetings
and student groups is that many students do not like the idea of
having guard rails.
“When personal choice is an option, it is always our
desire to provide it,” Foraker said.
Sometimes, when the guard rails are not taken off the bunk beds
in the beginning of the year, students remove the guard rails
themselves, Nam said.
Roughly 300 students request guard rails annually, less than 5
percent of all students living in the residence halls.
“We feel our students are adults and want to be treated as
adults. We feel they are better suited to make that
decision,” Foraker said.
But feeling that student safety was at risk because of the lack
of guard rails, Leonard Smith, Fallon’s father, asked UCLA to
put safety rails on all lofted beds.
UCLA did not do so, saying again that students should be able to
choose whether they want rails or not.