INDIANAPOLIS (Legal Newsline) - Parsing the fine details of Indiana’s bystander-injury rule, a state appeals court decided that a man who came across the scene of his burning house after a gas explosion can recover for emotional damages even though he never actually saw his wife’s body removed from the fire.
Ceres Solutions Cooperative filled a propane tank at the home of Kathy and Kenneth Bradley in July 2019 without checking the line for leaks. At 2:30 in the morning their son Eric turned on a light in the basement and was immediately engulfed in flames. He escaped the house and saw the roof collapsed and small fires throughout the wreckage.
Kenneth Bradley came across the scene about three hours later as he was driving home from work. He saw Eric, wrapped in a blanket with singed hair and what looked like a bad sunburn, but firefighters were still trying to put out the flames in the house. When they located his wife’s body, they told him to leave so they could remove it without him seeing its condition.
Ceres admitted negligence for failing to check the line but sought to dismiss the emotional-damage claims because Bradley came to the scene long after the explosion. The trial court granted dismissal on Bradley’s claim of distress from seeing his son but denied it as to his wife.
The Indiana Court of Appeals, in a Jan. 12 decision, said Bradley was entitled to sue over both.
To recover for emotional distress, plaintiffs usually have to comply with Indiana’s Modified Impact Rule, which requires some physical contact caused by the defendant. But that requirement is relaxed under the state’s Bystander Rule, under which the plaintiff must only establish “direct involvement” with the incident.
Whether the case fits the Bystander Rule is a question of law that the court decides by examining the severity of the victim’s injury, the relationship of plaintiff and victim, and how the plaintiff discovered the injury. Courts have further refined this to require that the plaintiff was at the scene when the injury occurred or immediately after, wasn’t informed about it earlier, and “the scene and victim must be in essentially the same condition as immediately following the incident.”
In this case, the explosion occurred at 2:30 a.m. and Bradley didn’t arrive until almost three hours later. Ceres argued that was too late; Bradley argued the fire was still raging and the explosion and fire were one event. Ceres also argued Bradley’s wife’s injuries were caused by the explosion, while Bradley cited his son’s testimony that he saw multiple small fires in the house when he escaped.
“Therefore, we conclude that the explosion and the fire are a single injury-producing event,” the appeals court said. To decide whether too much time elapsed between the explosion and Bradley’s arrival at the scene the court looked at decisions in other jurisdictions, including a 1997 West Virginia case where the court held “it is sufficient that the plaintiff is at the fire because it is actually the fire that is the injury-producing event.”
It’s also important that the bystander arrives ignorant of what is going on, the appeals court continued. The plaintiff can’t have learned about the incident beforehand and can’t deliberately go there to observe it. The Indiana Supreme Court rejected damages in a case where a father heard someone was killed in a motorcycle accident and rushed to the scene and discovered it was his son.
“Emotional trauma triggered by a news story of an accident is distinct from sudden shock that arises when one unwittingly comes upon a scene of an accident,” the state high court observed in that decision. But in this case, the appeals court ruled, all Bradley could see was his house on fire; he wasn’t told anything about his wife.
Bradley also satisfied the third prong by witnessing the “gruesome aftermath” of the incident, the court ruled, even though he was ushered away before his wife’s body was removed from the house. It’s enough that he observed the scene of the accident as it was when she died.
The key is that he suffered a “sudden sensory observation” even though he didn’t see the body.
“Even though Bradley was prevented from seeing his wife’s charred remains, the fact that he had to be removed to prevent this trauma would have triggered the type of horrible mental images one forms upon understanding the reality of a loved one’s gruesome death,” the court concluded.
The court reversed the dismissal of emotional damages claims over the sight of Eric’s burns, saying it was enough that Bradley came across his son at the scene of the fire and emergency personnel were still trying to put out the flames.