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# Santa Monica jury trial begins in metal box case
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/santa-monica-jury-trial-begins-in-metal-box-case/
- Published: 2002-05-31T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T00:18:43.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Crime, Pico, #archive-import

*By Daily Press staff*

A Santa Monica jury may be asked to decide whether a former piano shop employee commonly walks hunched over and looks down.

The demeanor of the man, David Henson, is at issue because he walked off an elevator, turned right, and walked straight into a metal box with a sharp lip. He is suing AT&T, the owner of the box, for damages in a jury trial which started Wednesday.

The incident happened in April 1999 at the Field’s Piano building on Pico and Bundy in West Los Angeles. Henson, at the time a sales executive for Field’s, was leaving the second story elevator with two clients when he hurt himself. AT&T, which maintained a cell phone store on that floor of the building, installed the metal box for couriers who used it after hours to pick up cell phones for delivery to customers.

Henson claims AT&T was negligent in locating the box. AT&T says no one else had been injured since its installation in 1996 and that the accident happened because Henson “simply wasn’t paying attention,” according to opening arguments by a company lawyer, Toni Kern.

A former AT&T employee testified that Henson “walks hunched over, looking down.”

Attorneys will make their arguments to the eight women, four men jury in Santa Monica Superior Court using a wooden model of the fateful box.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 31, 2002.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/053102.pdf?ref=smdp.com)