A paraplegic woman from Maine is suing General Motors after a seat heater in a friend's car left her with third-degree burns in 2012, The New York Daily News reported Monday.
Emma Verrill, 26, is claiming the burns required surgery and caused her to be bed-ridden for months. In a complaint filed on her behalf last month in the U.S. District Court in Portland, she said General Motors was negligent for not adequately testing the rear seat heaters in the Suburban she was riding in to prevent them from reaching "dangerously high temperatures that would burn human flesh," according to The Portland Press Herald.
The woman is paralyzed from the waist down and can't feel hot or cold in the lower half of her body. She said she couldn't feel that the seat heater in her friend's car had been switched on and gotten so hot that it seared her skin. It was a warm June day when she and her friend were driving from New York City to Connecticut, so there was no reason for the heater to be on.
Verill has been paralyzed since a spinal operation she underwent when she was 15 went horribly wrong. She will be bound to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Verill's skin was badly scarred under the blister, she learned during a hospital visit after the injury. Doctors had to remove a section of skin from her upper left thigh to graft in place of the burned flesh. She spent almost three months bedridden at her parent's home in Yarmouth, Maine, entirely dependent on her mom and dad who take time off from work to care for her.
"I couldn't do anything for myself," Verrill told The Portland Press Herald. "I was literally in bed on my stomach. It's not like I was just homebound."
General Motors has recalled more than 20 million vehicles in 2014 alone, but none of the recalled vehicles involved heated seats in the Suburban line. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not received any consumer complaints about the vehicles' seat heaters, The Portland Press Herald reported.
