COEUR d’ALENE — A trial date is set for next year in a case involving Coeur d’Alene Mayor Steve Widmyer, Coeur d’Alene Resort general manager Bill Reagan and others.

First District Court Judge Cynthia Meyer on Tuesday scheduled the trial, stemming from a wrongful death claim, for Jan. 22, 2018, penciling it in for a tentative six days.

Court documents filed in November allege Widmyer and Reagan, co-owners of the Royal Arms Apartments, were negligent and proximately caused the November 2014 death of 73-year-old tenant Margie Saunders.

Saunders died of hypothermia due to the apartment complex’s heating deficiencies, according to her son and the case’s lone plaintiff, Stephen Saunders.

At Tuesday’s scheduling conference, Theron DeSmet, Saunders’ attorney, requested the trial be held in late August or early September.

“I don’t think there’s a need to push it out a year,” DeSmet told Meyer. “We’re well on our way in the discovery (pre-trial procedures in which evidence is obtained) process.”

However, the request of defense attorneys Todd Startzel and Robert Mills to set the trial about a year from now was granted by Meyer.

Mills said he has more than 12 witnesses he plans to include in the defense’s case.

Attorneys for both sides said two formal attempts at mediation over the past six months to settle the matter outside a trial fizzled, necessitating the need for a trial.

“If the parties tried formal mediation, I’m not inclined to order it again,” Meyer told the attorneys. “Of course, the parties are always free to pursue that themselves.”

Stephen Saunders claims the defendants received several complaints from tenants about a lack of heat and hot water over a seven-month period leading up to his mother’s death.

The plaintiff claims Margie Saunders died alone in her apartment on her 73rd birthday due to below-freezing temperatures. However, a Kootenai County coroner’s report states Saunders, a widow who lived in the Section 8 apartments since 2001, died between Nov. 11 and Nov. 12, 2014, due to both hypothermia and ethanol intoxication.

Ethanol is the principle type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages.