ST. LOUIS (Legal Newsline) – A man arrested on a business trip after drunkenly breaking into the wrong hotel room and getting undressed and in bed with a little girl he then fondled has lost his lawsuit that blamed the hotel for him getting fired.
The Missouri Court of Appeals issued its decision May 12 in the strange case of Daniel Hughes, a former Enterprise Leasing Company regional executive whose participation in a March 2011 sales meeting in Clayton, Mo., resulted in arrest, acquittal and termination.
It also led to his lawsuit, which blames the hotel for giving him the wrong room key when he forgot his room number in the middle of the night following a dinner. The decision says Hughes was “voluntarily intoxicated” when he returned to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel following a business dinner.
“Plaintiff alleges his termination as a result of this behavior was proximately caused by Defendants’ negligence in giving him the key to the wrong room,” says the decision, authored by Judge Lisa Page.
“However, there is no genuine dispute of material fact regarding Plaintiff’s conduct following the alleged negligence of Defendants, nor that such conduct was not a natural or probable consequence to being given the key to room 1611.”
Hughes was actually staying in room 811, but he lost his room key during the night of the business dinner and asked for a new one when he returned to the hotel. He told the worker he was in room 1611 and was given a key to that room.
But the security chain on the door was in place, so he broke it. The family inside the room included a nine-year-old girl in a bed of her own. He undressed and got under the covers with her, the ruling says.
When the parents noticed, they kicked him out of the room. Hughes was stopped in the lobby by a security guard, eventually arrested and charged with four counts of lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor. He was acquitted in 2014 on all charges.
Hughes had not bothered to ask the family why they were in what he thought was his room. He admitted to police he “was rubbing her butt and I could feel her skin.” He touched her breasts, legs and shoulders and tried to kiss her and pull her on top of his body.
He was fired and blamed the hotel for not protecting him from himself during his state of obvious intoxication.
The court found that the hotel could not have predicted what would happen and that Hughes was already on probation with Enterprise at the time.