Appeal from judgments of the District Court of Suffolk County, Second District (Patrick J. Barton, J.), entered June 27, 2005. The judgments, after a nonjury trial, awarded plaintiff the principal sum of $6,661.43 against defendant Super Dads Auto, Inc. and the principal sum of $5,029.71 against defendants Super Dads Auto, Inc. and John's Transmission, Inc. d/b/a Ability Transmission.

Judgments reversed without costs and complaint dismissed.

Plaintiff commenced this action to recover damages resulting from defendants' alleged negligent repairs to the transmission of one of plaintiff's trucks and for breach of warranty. After a nonjury trial, the court found that defendant Super Dads Auto, Inc.
(Super), which had initially subcontracted the work to defendant John's Transmission, Inc. d/b/a Ability Transmission (Ability), breached the warranty it issued to plaintiff on March 5, 2002. Accordingly, the court awarded plaintiff judgment against Super in the principal sum of $6,661.43. The court further found that Super and Ability were jointly liable in the principal sum of $5,029.71 for the latter's failure to properly repair the truck's transmission, and it awarded a second judgment against both defendants in this principal amount.

In our view, the judgments must be reversed and the complaint dismissed. It is well settled that "[o]n appeal from a judgment entered after a nonjury trial, [an appellate] [c]ourt may render the judgment it finds warranted by the facts, taking into account in a close case the fact that the trial judge had the advantage of seeing the witnesses. . . . However, a determination of a [*2]trial court after a nonjury trial should not be disturbed on appeal unless it is not supported by legally sufficient evidence or could not have been reached by any fair interpretation of the evidence" (Halpern v Goldstein & Halpern, C.P.A., 18 AD3d 432, 433 [2005] [citations and internal quotation marks omitted]; see also Kahan v Sulaymanov, 24 AD3d 612 [2005]). In the instant case, the court's decision indicates that the judgment against defendant Super was predicated upon the court's belief that the warranty which Super issued to plaintiff on March 5, 2002 was for six months or 60,000 miles. In fact, the record establishes that the warranty was actually for six months or 6,000 miles and the documentary evidence reflected that the warranty had expired due to mileage. The court's conclusion that Super breached the warranty was based upon the court's mistaken belief that the warranty was still in effect. In any event, the testimony of plaintiff's president, who admitted that he had no automotive repair experience, was insufficient to establish that defendant negligently repaired the transmission or that there was a breach of the warranty. In addition, the paid bill introduced into evidence by plaintiff for repairs subsequently performed by another party did not constitute prima facie evidence pursuant to CPLR 4533-a because, inter alia, the cost of the repairs exceeded $2,000. Moreover, the bill was insufficient to establish that the repairs performed by defendants were negligently done. We note that the owner of defendant Super, who had 32 years of automotive repair experience, and the owner of defendant Ability, who had at least 10 years of automotive repair experience, each testified that the subsequent repairs made to plaintiff's truck were unrelated to the prior work they performed, and they explained why each subsequent repair was necessary. Accordingly, the judgments entered against defendants must be reversed and the complaint dismissed since plaintiff failed to satisfy its burden of proof (see Halpern v Goldstein & Halpern, C.P.A., 18 AD3d at 433; see also Lavi v Old Cedar Dev. Corp., 19 AD3d 372 [2005]; Ancewicz v Western Suffolk BOCES, 282 AD2d 632 [2001]).

We note that in view of the disposition herein, we need not reach the issue of the propriety of the two judgments which seemingly permit plaintiff to recover the total principal sum of $11,691.14 as against Super.

Rudolph, P.J., McCabe and Lippman, JJ., concur.
Decision Date: October 5, 2006