Parents of girl who died in Royal Caribbean ship fall can sue

Royal Caribbean has failed to stop a multi-million dollar negligence suit brought by the parents of an Indiana toddler who plunged 11 decks to her death from a cruise ship window, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The company’s lawyers argued there was no case because Chloe Wiegand’s grandfather, Salvatore ‘Sam’ Anello, was solely to blame for dropping the little girl 150ft on to a concrete dock in San Juan, Puerto Rico on July 7.

However US District Judge Donald L. Graham denied Royal Caribbean’s motion to dismiss on Wednesday, ruling that Alan and Kimberly Wiegand can proceed with their complaint.

Police officer Alan, 41, and his attorney wife Kimberly, 37, could claim ‘unlimited’ damages for pain and mental suffering if their suit, filed in Miami federal court, succeeds.

However, the grieving couple from South Bend, Indiana say their sole motivation is to force Royal Caribbean to make their windows safer so 18-month-old Chloe’s horror death is never repeated.

The company’s lawyers argued there was no case because Chloe Wiegand’s grandfather, Salvatore ‘Sam’ Anello (pictured together), was solely to blame for dropping the little girl 150ft on to a concrete dock in San Juan, Puerto Rico on July 7

The couple’s suit says there were no signs or notices to warn Anello that the ‘wall of glass’ surrounding a children’s splash pool featured windows that could be slid open by passengers.

When he lifted the little girl up to let her bang on the glass, as she loved to do at her brother’s ice hockey games, Chloe tumbled through the opening and died instantly as she landed on the Pan American Pier 2.

Despite the ship’s windows having handles and a blue-green tint, the suit says it was harder for Anello to distinguish between a window and the space where a pane had been slid aside because he is color blind.

In its motion to dismiss, Royal Caribbean denied breaching industry safety standards, saying Anello ‘unquestionably’ knew the window was open and would only have had to use his ‘basic senses’ to realize he was endangering his grandchild.

The cruise operator also filed footage from two on board cameras that seemed to show Anello leaning his head through the window and dangling Chloe over the side of the $800 million vessel.

‘His actions, which no reasonable person could have foreseen, were reckless and irresponsible and the sole reason why Chloe is no longer with her parents,’ the motion stated.

It provoked a robust response from the Wiegands’ legal team who boarded the Freedom of the Seas ship last month to carry out an unsupervised inspection, taking their own measurements and photos.

Their findings suggested it was ‘physically impossible’ for Anello to have leaned out of the widow, as he would have needed to be seven inches off the ground to stretch from the waist-height handrail to the window-frame.

The couple’s suit says there were no signs or notices to warn Anello that the ‘wall of glass’ surrounding a children’s splash pool featured windows that could be slid open by passengers. When he lifted the little girl up to let her bang on the glass, as she loved to do at her brother’s ice hockey games, Chloe tumbled through the opening and died instantly as she landed on the Pan American Pier 2

Royal Caribbean described the claim as ‘baseless’, saying none of the additional cameras captured the accident and two were in fact audio speakers.

The silver-haired grandpa would also have needed extraordinarily long arms to have dangled the little girl over the edge of the 154,000-ton vessel, their counter-filing argued.

The Wiegands; attorney’s also pointed out 11 additional cameras that Royal Caribbean had allegedly failed to disclose, accusing the cruise operator of cherry-picking the angles that best suited their ‘false narrative’.

However Royal Caribbean described the claim as ‘baseless’, saying none of the additional cameras captured the accident and two were in fact audio speakers.

Judge Graham determined in a seven-page ruling on Wednesday that the Wiegands’ suit had presented a factual and plausible case at face value.

He denied the motion to dismiss, saying Royal Caribbean had woven images and statements into their filing that went beyond the scope of the complaint and ‘catapulted’ the case into the discovery stage.

Sources close to the Wiegands’ lawsuit estimate it could take a year to come before a jury by which time Anello of Valparaiso, Indiana is likely to have stood trial in Puerto Rico for negligent homicide.

Dr. Van Drunick told Puerto Rican investigators: ‘Her one pink shoe and the white hat was lying on the pier not far from the deceased. I immediately shouted for a sheet to cover the body.’ Pictured: The last photo of Chloe before she fell to her death

Video footage shows the moment Anello dropped Chloe, 18 months, from the cruise ship. He slumps to the ground in shock and horror as he watches Chloe fall to her death after lifting her up to see out a window

Prosecutors in the US territory are pressing on with criminal misdemeanor charges against the elderly IT worker, despite Chloe’s parents pleading with them to drop proceedings.

‘We have never wanted charges filed against Sam because we know with all of our hearts that he would never put Chloe in harm’s way,’ they said last week, in a statement provided exclusively to DailyMail.com.

‘We will stand with Sam as long as it takes – but we cannot grieve as a family until the criminal charges are dropped.’

Angelic Chloe and her granddad were about to embark on a seven-night Caribbean cruise with her parents, older brother, fraternal grandparents and Anello’s wife Patricia, when the tragedy unfolded.

The vacation was supposed to take in the sun-drenched sights of San Juan, St Maarten, St Kitts, Antigua, St Lucia and Barbados but it ended in horror before the boat had even set sail.

Anello could be jailed for three years but prosecutors are likely to request probation if he’s found guilty.

‘All I know is I was trying to reach the glass and I know that we leaned over to try to have her reach the glass, at that point she slipped,’ he said in an interview with CBS.

‘Chloe being gone is the worst thing ever so I’m like, whatever, you know. There’s nothing worse that they could do to me than what’s already happened.’