Opinion
January 19, 1999.
Appeal from the Supreme Court, New York County (Robert Lippmann, J.).
The motion court properly denied the motion to amend since the proposed amendment was utterly without merit ( see, Hill v. Giuliani, 249 A.D.2d 28; Frost v. Monter, 202 A.D.2d 632; Camelot Graphics v. Ellis, 178 A.D.2d 375; see also, Sirohi v. Lee, 222 A.D.2d 222). Notwithstanding the passage of some four and one-half years since plaintiffs' decedent was found dead upon subway tracks, plaintiffs failed, despite their conduct of extensive discovery, to offer any evidence supportive of their proposed amendment's newly advanced factual premise for liability, namely, that the decedent met his end, not when he was hit by an oncoming train as originally alleged, but when he was propelled from, between the cars of a moving train by a violent jerk in the train's motion. However, there, is at this advanced juncture in the litigation no evidence that plaintiffs' decedent boarded a train, much less that he fell from a train for the reasons recently alleged. Apart from the futility of allowing the assertion of a theory of liability so patently without evidentiary basis, permitting the proposed theory's assertion so late in the litigation would be highly prejudicial to defendant since it would force defendant to conduct a renewed and refocused investigation of the events relevant to the decedent's demise long after the fact and at a time when accurate recollection of the crucial circumstances is bound, to have faded. Indeed, it is precisely to avoid such prejudice that a timely notice of claim has been made a condition of maintaining a negligence action against a public corporation ( see, Moore v. New York City Tr. Auth., 189 A.D.2d 862). Since that condition has not been met with respect to the claim plaintiffs would now assert, and, indeed, may no longer be met, the proposed claim's assertion is barred as a matter of law ( see, Chipurnoi v. Manhattan Bronx Surface Tr. Operating Auth., 216 A.D.2d 171, 172).
Concur — Sullivan, J.P., Lerner, Rubin and Tom, JJ.