For a second time this month, The Toro Company faces a wrongful-death lawsuit in Pittsburgh, as a woman blames one of its lawn mowers for her husband’s fatal accident.
Susan Holt sued Toro and Exmark Manufacturing Company last week in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas over the 2024 death of Jeffrey Holt, who worked as a landscape technician for a company in Mercer County that had purchased the 2018 Exmark Lazer Z, a zero-turn lawn tractor.
It is alleged Holt was ejected from his seat, but the engine continued running despite the blades being activated. When he fell, Holt bumped or attempted to grab one of the motion control levers.
“The Lazer Z was defective in that it did not contain Jeffrey P. Holt to his seat,” the lawsuit says.
“The movement of the Lazer Z and of its blades did not stop as they should have when Jeffrey P. Holt was ejected from the Lazer Z due to the design failures of the mower’s integral/integrated seat safety switch and motion control levers. The above referenced failures resulted in the death of Jeffrey P. Holt.”
There are two explanations posed by the suit: either the machine failed on its own or it had been modified so that the operator could bypass the feature that shuts off the engine when weight is removed from the seat. The suit says Toro and Exmark are aware that some who buy that model make that change.
Either way, “Defendants Exmark and Toro are responsible regardless for the failure of the equipment they designed,” the suit says.
A week earlier, Toro was hit with a similar case over the death of a Washington County paving contractor who jumped out of a roller when it lost momentum on a sloped driveway and began backing into the street.
Bill Chandler spent eight days on life support before he passed in May 2024. Toro was sued because it acquired the company that manufactured the roller in 2012.
Toro bought Exmark in 1997. The two are accused of putting a dangerous product into the stream of commerce, specifically that the “motion control levers… did not operate in such a way as to prevent operators who had been ejected from the Lazer Z from being run over by the same.”
Holt was 51 years old when he passed. Dallas Hartman and Patrick Sullian of New Castle represent the plaintiff.
