LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) - Two women who were shot at a colleague’s home by her mentally incapacitated son can’t sue her employer, a California appeals court ruled, rejecting plaintiff arguments the company had a duty to provide a safe working environment or should have prohibited employees from working at home.
Carol Holaday was a dispatcher for Colonial Van & Storage who worked from her Fresno home when she wanted. In March 2017, she invited coworker Crystal Dominguez and Rachel Schindler, who worked for another moving company, over to her house for socializing that included some discussion of work. During the gathering, Holaday’s son Kyle shot all three and killed his father, Jim Willcoxson.
Dominguez and Schindler sued Colonial for negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Colonial moved for summary judgment but the trial judge refused, finding there were disputed facts for a jury to decide, including the extent to which Colonial employees worked in Holaday’s home, why Dominguez was there the night of the shooting and whether the plaintiffs were friends with Kyle, an unemployed veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Colonial appealed and the California Supreme Court directed it to the Second District for decision. That court, in a March 18 ruling, found that the case against Colonial should be dismissed.
The plaintiffs argued Colonial owed them a duty to protect since the company controlled Holaday’s home and could have foreseen the attack. Colonial said there was no evidence it owned or controlled the home. The appeals court agreed, saying that while California courts have found “control” includes overt acts like building a fence around property owned by someone else or repairing holes in the lawn, there was no evidence Colonial set Holaday’s working hours, installed a security system or designated the house as a business location in its tax or insurance records.
The court rejected arguments Colonial’s duty arose from the fact it obtained commercial benefit from Holaday’s home. The plaintiffs cited a 1988 appeals-court ruling that allowed a lawsuit to proceed against a convenience store over a shooting that occurred on a vacant lot customers used for parking. But in that case there was evidence the store treated the property as its own, including trying to shoo loiterers off the lot, the appeals court said. In a 1990 decision, the Second Division rejected liability for Pacific Bell over a shooting that occurred near a pay phone used by drug dealers.
Companies also aren’t generally liable for the actions of third parties unless they have a “special relationship” with the plaintiffs, the court said, defined as having “some control over the plaintiff’s welfare.” Dominguez couldn’t use that exception here, the court said, because the shooting occurred at a private residence the company didn’t control and Colonial didn’t have a special relationship with Kyle.
“We conclude that imposing on an employer, like Colonial, a duty to ensure that a working-from-home employee’s private residence is safe for visiting coworkers and business associates would be entirely unfounded and unfair,” the court ruled.
Public policy also argues against holding employers liable for such crimes, the court said. They would become the “insurers of the safety of working-at-home employees,” obligated to take intrusive measures like inspecting the home for weapons, vetting all visitors and even posting security guards and installing cameras.
“Employees would have to be willing to accept their employer’s intrusions into their daily lives, the modifications to their home, and working in a state of siege,” the court said. The plaintiffs argued companies could avoid liability by prohibiting employees from working from home but that would place even larger burdens on workers and would have been impossible during the covid crisis, the court concluded.
Colonial was represented by Horvitz & Levy and Bremer Whyte Brown & O’Meara. The plaintiffs were represented by Marderosian & Cohen, the Law Offices of Frank M. Nunes and Haffner Law.