Lindon family's sinking-home nightmare brings $3.1 million award

Above the dining room table, the white ceiling sags and has even split, leaving a gap in what used to be pristine plaster.

Giant cracks snake across the walls, and at night, Mark and Marilyn Hess used to wake to the creaks and groans of their 6,500-square-foot Lindon home sinking beneath them.

It's been more than three years since the couple filed a lawsuit against their builder, developer and engineer, alleging they were never shown a 1997 report detailing collapsible soils in the area where they built their dream home.

A 4th District Court jury last week came back after nearly nine hours of deliberation and awarded the Hess family just over $3.17 million for home repairs and emotional distress, due to fraudulent nondisclosure and fraudulent misrepresentation by Canberra Development Co. and its chief executive officer, David Allen.

"This shows that justice will happen," said the Hesses' attorney, Stephen Quesenberry. "Of this award, $2.65 million was for mental distress, pain and suffering. That's significant. The rest was for repairs and engineering. We're talking about someone's home here. These jurors understood what we were dealing with."

Quesenberry, a settling-home expert, said he believes this is the largest settlement in Utah for a home-settling case, and the second largest settlement in Utah County for real-estate fraud.

The problems started four years ago, when Mark Hess went downstairs to feed the family dog but couldn't open the back door.

He pushed, pulled and shoved, eventually resorting to a crowbar.

As soon as he got the door open, Hess said he heard the house shift and settle even more. At that point, the door became impossible to completely close for the next several years.

In time, most doors and windows in the home became inoperable. And the house continued to settle.

"Every time it rained, the house moved," Hess said. One night, he found himself outside yelling at the sky to stop raining, terrified that his house was breaking apart.

The walls split, the dining room developed a downhill slope, and the basement floor cracked.

The front left corner of the house got so low that Hess was worried the city would "red tag" the home and evict them.

So in May 2005, he put $30,000 on his credit card and had professionals raise the front left corner of the home 5 1/2 inches.

"They told us how much it was going to cost, and I almost choked," Hess said. "I sunk everything I had to get into his home. I've been planning for this for 20 years. This is our first home."

"We didn't ever really want to bail," Marilyn Hess said.

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