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Marina Bay Residences, LLC vs. Callahan, Inc. et al

Superior Court·Norfolk County·Last checked Jul 25, 2026, 8:10 PM·View on masscourts.org ↗

01— Where things stand right now

This is a big, four-year-old construction-defect case over water leaks at the Meriel Marina Bay development in Quincy. The main litigation is in the expert-reports and summary-judgment phase, with a jury trial now pushed all the way to August 3, 2026. Meanwhile, two non-parties — Sandra Fernandez (on behalf of her minor son “K.F.”) and her husband Dany Abouelkhier — have flooded the docket with emergency motions to intervene, TRO requests, and insurance-disclosure demands, and virtually every party in the case has jointly opposed them.

02— The case in a nutshell

Marina Bay Residences, LLC built (or owns) the Meriel Marina Bay development in Quincy. It says the building leaks — water intrusion through the building envelope — and in 2021 it sued the architect (Cube 3 Studio) and the general contractor (Callahan, Inc.) for negligence and breach of contract.

From there the case exploded outward. Callahan sued its subcontractors as third-party defendants; one of those (Exterior Designs, Inc., now EDI Holdings) sued a dozen more subcontractors and product suppliers as fourth-party defendants; and one of those (Harvey Industries) brought in fifth-party defendants. As of a March 2025 filing there were counsel for 17 parties.

Separately, tenants of the building have their own litigation. A putative tenant class action (2382CV00389) and a severed individual case (2582CV00364) involve Dany Abouelkhier. He and his wife Sandra Fernandez are now trying to force their way into this construction case too, mainly to compel insurance disclosures and to “preserve” the rights of their minor son.

03— Who's involved
04— What's happening now

Two tracks are running at once.

Track one is the real construction case. After a status conference on April 30, 2025, Judge Leighton extended all the deadlines (fact discovery to June 30, 2025; expert designations rolling into the fall; summary judgment motions due late 2025) and moved the jury trial from November 2025 to August 3, 2026, with a final pretrial conference set for January 14, 2026 and a final trial conference for July 13, 2026. Two mediations have happened — December 2024 (unsuccessful) and May 27–28, 2025 — and settlement talks are described as active. Harvey Industries has a fully-briefed summary judgment motion pending against EDI’s claims, along with EDI’s counter-motions to strike Harvey’s unauthenticated exhibits and to defer the motion as premature under Rule 56(f). A joint motion was filed to reschedule the August 13, 2025 motion hearing.

Track two is the intervention fight. In late July 2025 Fernandez and Abouelkhier served a cluster of emergency ex parte motions: motions to intervene, TROs, demands that every defendant disclose all insurance policies, and requests that the clerk be ordered to docket filings they say were suppressed. Marina Bay filed a 14-page omnibus opposition joined by essentially every other party in the case; Cube 3 filed its own omnibus opposition. Their arguments: the motions don’t comply with Rule 24(c) (no proposed pleading attached), they’re four years late, there are no common questions of law or fact, a non-lawyer parent can’t litigate for her child, and any tort claim would be dead anyway under the six-year statute of repose (G.L. c. 260, § 2B), since the certificate of substantial completion issued April 23, 2018.

The most recent filing is Fernandez’s August 1 “Notice of Misconduct,” which quotes an email from defense attorney Mark Bodner saying “I hate dealing with whack a doodle pro se people…” and asks the court to take judicial notice, strike Cube 3’s opposition as non-compliant with Rule 9A, and refer Bodner to the Board of Bar Overseers.

05— What's next

The judge has to rule on the intervention motions, the TRO requests, and the related “notices” — and Marina Bay has separately asked the court to require any non-party to get leave before filing anything else under this docket number. Fernandez’s newest filing also asks the court to strike Cube 3’s opposition and refer a defense lawyer to bar counsel; those requests are pending.

On the main case, Harvey Industries’ summary judgment motion (and EDI’s motions to strike and to defer it) are pending and a hearing was requested; a joint motion was filed to move the August 13, 2025 hearing date.

Longer term, the schedule in the record runs: final pretrial conference January 14, 2026 (Zoom), trial submissions by July 7, 2026, final trial conference July 13, 2026, and a four-week jury trial starting August 3, 2026. Given two rounds of mediation and “active settlement negotiations” described in the filings, a negotiated resolution before trial is a realistic possibility, though nothing in the docket says a deal is done.

06— Reading between the lines

The construction case itself looks like ordinary — if enormous — defect litigation. Everybody sues everybody downstream so that no single party eats the whole loss, and the March 2025 joint motion candidly admits the parties have actually been cooperating: 16 witnesses deposed over 18 days, coordinated scheduling across 17 parties, two mediations. The one-year trial continuance was jointly requested and assented to by nearly everyone, so that’s not delay tactics — that’s a genuinely unwieldy case needing more runway.

Harvey Industries’ summary judgment play is standard supplier strategy: get out early by arguing there’s no evidence its product caused the leaks. EDI’s response — move to strike Harvey’s unauthenticated exhibits under Rule 56(e) and argue lay witnesses were improperly asked expert questions, plus a Rule 56(f) request to defer because expert reports aren’t done — is a legitimate, well-worn defensive playbook. Whether it works depends on the judge, but it’s not frivolous.

The intervention fight is a different animal. The defense’s legal arguments are strong on their face: Rule 24(c) really does require a proposed pleading, no such pleading was attached, and the statute of repose point (substantial completion April 2018, six-year bar, and Tindol holding minority doesn’t toll it) is a serious obstacle. The Massachusetts rule that a non-lawyer parent can’t litigate for her child is also real. So this appears to be legitimate opposition, not stonewalling.

At the same time, it looks like Fernandez and Abouelkhier are doing something the court has already told them not to do. Marina Bay’s opposition says the court previously denied Fernandez’s motions to intervene in the class action, that over 80 motions and notices have been served across the related dockets, and that this filing is a “new front.” Filing ex parte emergency TROs that mostly complain about clerks not docketing things — as Marina Bay points out, aimed at the clerk rather than the parties — is not what TROs are for, and it reads as pro se litigants using volume and urgency labels to get attention.

That said, the Bodner email, if it says what Fernandez quotes, is a genuinely bad look for the defense bar, and her decision to put it in the record is shrewd rather than crazy. It won’t fix the Rule 24 or statute-of-repose problems, but it hands the court a reason to treat her more carefully. And her underlying grievance — that her family’s mold/injury claims are being processed in a docket where she feels she has no voice while everyone else negotiates insurance money — is understandable even if this construction case is the wrong forum for it. The defense request that non-parties need leave of court before filing again is the tell: they want a gate, and after 80-plus filings across three dockets, courts often grant one.

A candid read, not legal advice.
07— The record, translated

Newest first — the plain-English reading leads; the court's wording follows.