Around this time last year, Sarah Sacuto’s husband died after he overlooked some hazardous warning signs and attempted to take a shortcut by climbing over a fence. The forty-year-old Boston law professor, Milton David Jones, died twenty feet below after the staircase he was walking on crumbled beneath him. There had been fences and warning signs around the old, rusty staircase preventing people from going near it.
On September 11, 2021, Jones died after falling from a rusty staircase. He was an associate professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy and Management at the School of Public Health and passed away near JFK/UMass T station located in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The staircase that he fell through had been closed for twenty months to the public because it was deemed unsafe. His death in September 2021 left behind his wife and three children.
Even though the police say Jones’s death was an accident, his wife Sarah Sacuto thinks there is more to the story. She has filed a lawsuit against the MBTA and Massachusetts Department of Education for not warning people enough about how dangerous that staircase was.
The stairs had been closed to the public and a wire fence installed to keep people away for twenty months prior to the associate professor’s death. According to her lawsuit, Sacuto believes that more could have been done to stop people from falling and dying via the staircase’s rust.
“The defendants, by their neglect, had allowed the ‘subject staircase’ to degrade and fall into disrepair thereby causing it to be a danger to the public,” the lawsuit reads.
Sacuto believes the defendants are at fault for her husband’s death. The couple shared three children together. Now, she seeks compensation from the defendants for their mistakes in an undisclosed amount.
At the time of the professor’s death, there was a fence around the staircase and warning signs posted. Since the man’s accidental death on the rickety staircase, his widow tearfully told reporters that he had gone for a run and never returned home.
Around 1:30 PM, passersby notified Massachusetts State Troopers that they had found Jones’s body underneath a staircase.
Mr. David Procopio, a spokesman for the Massachusetts state police, said last year that the professor’s body “had been observed under a set of stairs a short time earlier by a passerby who called police.”
When the detectives arrived, they “observed a gap in the stairs above the victim, who had already been determined to be deceased.”
“If you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, this could have happened to anybody,” Saunders stated. “You can’t really notice whether the stairs are there or not unless you really, really look hard.”
