A year? Maybe. Maybe not. In Syracuse, that answer can be dead wrong.

If a high school athlete fell through an unsecured opening on a roof during a school event, the first deadline to worry about is usually not the lawsuit deadline. It is the notice deadline.

The 90-day problem most families miss

If the event involved a public school or public school district, you usually need to serve a Notice of Claim within 90 days of the accident.

Not "when the insurance company gets around to calling you."

Not "after you figure out the MRI bill."

Ninety days.

That matters in Syracuse because a lot of these events involve Syracuse City School District property, district staff, or a city-owned facility used for a school function. If that is the setup, New York's municipal claim rules kick in fast.

After that, the usual lawsuit deadline is often one year and 90 days against the public entity.

That is where your uncle probably got the "a year" idea. It is close enough to sound smart and wrong enough to wreck a case.

If the property is private, the timeline changes

If the fall happened at a private facility in Syracuse, DeWitt, Salina, or somewhere else in Onondaga County being used for a school event, the deadline may be different.

A standard New York personal injury case against a private property owner is usually three years from the accident date.

That is a huge difference.

So the first real question is not "who is denying fault?" It is "who actually owned, controlled, managed, or maintained that roof?"

Because the deadlines follow the defendant.

The owner and maintenance company denial game

This is where it gets ugly.

The property owner says, "We hired a maintenance company."

The maintenance company says, "We did not create that opening" or "We were not responsible for event safety."

Meanwhile, the clock keeps running.

In roof-fall cases, especially in Central New York after winter freeze-thaw damage, temporary covers, access panels, and maintenance openings can become a finger-pointing mess. A flat roof in March or April around Syracuse is not some abstract legal problem. Snow load, sloppy repairs, and leftover temporary work are real.

And no, their denial does not buy you extra time.

A student athlete is not a construction worker

This confuses people in New York because roof injuries make people think of Labor Law Section 240, the scaffold law.

That law can be brutal for owners and contractors in worker cases. Construction workers in New York City use it all the time after elevation-related falls. But a high school athlete at a school event is not a covered worker just because the injury happened on a roof.

So this is usually a premises liability and negligence case, not a Labor Law 240 case.

Different theory. Same urgency.

What to pin down immediately

You need to know four things fast:

• whether the site was public or private
• who owned the building
• who had the maintenance contract
• who supervised the students during the event

That answer may not come from the adjuster. It may come from event paperwork, permits, vendor contracts, district records, or incident reports.

The medical timeline matters too

If the athlete did not look seriously hurt at first, do not let that fool anybody. Falls through roof openings can mean spinal injuries, knee damage, wrist fractures, shoulder tears, and head injuries that get worse after the adrenaline burns off.

The defense loves gaps in treatment.

If there is a long pause between the ER visit and orthopedic, neuro, or PT follow-up, expect them to argue the injury was minor or came from sports later on, not the fall.

That is especially common with high school athletes, because the other side will try to blame training, lifting, or a later game.

Syracuse-specific reality

If this happened at a city school site, the paperwork trail may run through district administration, not just the building. If it happened at a private site used by a school team or booster event, expect insurance carriers for the owner and the maintenance company to stall while each points at the other.

Cases get filed in Onondaga County, but the early fight is usually over notice, records, and control of the property.

That is the part people lose before they ever get to argue about fault.

So no, your uncle is not really right. In a Syracuse school-event roof fall, waiting around because "you've got a year" is exactly how a family blows the 90-day notice deadline and loses leverage before the case even starts.