RIVERSIDE, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - Parents of a man who was killed after encountering his assailants from an earlier fight can’t recover money from the bar where the initial fracas occurred, a California appeals court ruled.
Assigning liability to the bar for failing to call the police when it ejected the men for fighting would waste police resources and potentially drive up insurance costs, California’s Fourth Appellate District Court ruled, affirming a trial court’s dismissal of the case. The police can’t arrest everyone involved in a bar fight “and certainly will not follow participants in bar fights around, in hopes of preventing a future fight,” the court said.
Tina and David Glynn sued the owners of the District Lounge after their son Nicholas was stabbed to death in the early morning of July 29, 2018. Nicholas and a friend got into a fight with several other men in the District Lounge and were escorted to the parking lot by security. About an hour later, Nicholas and his friend ran into the men they had been fighting with in the bar and another fight ensued, in which Nicholas was stabbed to death.
The Glynns argued the bar violated its general duty of ordinary care, as laid out in section 1714 of the California Civil Code, in part by failing to follow its own policy of calling the police on patrons who fight.
California courts have found businesses liable for failing to protect patrons against foreseeable threats such as assailants lurking in a parking lot, the appeals court said in a Sept. 29 decision. And courts examine the duty of businesses in such situations according to a number of conditions, including whether the defendant deserves “moral blame” for failing to act.
“The lack of a call to 911 when the parties had been separated and had peaceably gone their separate ways is not the sort of conduct to which moral blame ordinarily attaches,” the court wrote, however. “One wonders what plaintiffs would have expected defendants to report to the police dispatcher in this instance.”
The court also rejected plaintiff arguments the bar should have anticipated what happened to Nicholas later.
“The undisputed evidence was that Nicholas and J.D. left the bar and the assailants left separately; the fight was over, inasmuch as could be determined, and therefore was not `ongoing,’” the court concluded. “Nicholas and J.D. did not encounter the assailants again while walking around nearby until nearly an hour later.”
The Glynns were represented by Anthony A. Liberatore and Leslie L. Niven, while the bar owners were represented by Todd C. Worthe and McKenzie C. Foellmer of Worthe Hanson & Worthe.