Should Parents Have To Pay $132,000 For Statue Broken By Son?

A 5-year-old broke a statue in a Kansas community center. But should the parents have to pay to fix it?

Sarah Goodman and her 5-year-old son Troy were at a wedding reception at the Tomahawk Ridge Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas. In one of the main communal areas of the center, Goodman’s son and another child were playing when he started hugging a statue.

The statue’s called Aphrodite di Kansas City, and was on loan to the city of Overland Park. It doesn’t take long for the statue to get real wobbly and topple over. The kid wasn’t hurt, but the statue definitely took some damage.

Sarah Goodman knew she’d have to pay for repairs, but was shocked when she was given an estimate. Goodman told the local CBS affiliate “We heard a bunch of commotion and I thought, ‘Whose yelling at my son?’ This glass mosaic torso is laying on the ground and someone is following me around demanding my personal information.” She also said she received a letter from an insurance company accusing her of negligence.

Now, contrary to popular belief, there is no universal “you break it, you buy it” law. In situations like this, a court would try to determine if someone acted negligently, and if the damage was “reasonably foreseeable.”

And it’s there that Goodman might have a pretty strong case. She said: “It’s in the main walkway. Not a separate room. No plexiglass. Not protected. Not held down. There was no border around it. There wasn’t even a sign around it that said, ‘Do not touch.'”

That being said, had the child been more strongly supervised, he probably wouldn’t have started feeling up the statue in the first place. A spokesperson for the city of Overland Park told KCTV: “It was a piece that was loaned to us that we are responsible for. That’s public money. We are responsible to protect the public investment.”

But, that same spokesperson also says they want to let the insurance companies handle it, and that they won’t be billing the Goodman family.

[He called reports that the city wants the family to come up with the $132,000 “a misunderstanding.”

So that’s good. But Goodman was also upset that nobody seemed to care if her son had been injured. She said: “He’s honestly been having bad dreams every night. None of these people have ever once said, ‘How is Troy? How is your son holding up? Is his face okay?'”

Fortunately, apart from the bad dreams, Troy does appear to be fine.