Burns v. Gleason Plant Sec., Inc., 5076
Decision Date | 14 April 1987 |
Docket Number | No. 5076,5076 |
Citation | 10 Conn.App. 480,523 A.2d 940 |
Court | Connecticut Court of Appeals |
Parties | Edward BURNS et al. v. GLEASON PLANT SECURITY, INC., et al. |
Alfred P. Forino, Danbury, for appellants (plaintiffs).
Paul M. Clyons, Rocky Hill, for the appellees (named defendant et al.).
Before BORDEN, SPALLONE and BIELUCH, JJ.
The dispositive issue in this case is whether the plaintiffs can maintain a cause of action in negligence against the defendants, a security company and its employee, where the employee left a key in the ignition of a company car which was subsequently stolen by a third party, who drove it to the plaintiff's store and, in the course of committing an armed robbery, assaulted the named plaintiff. 1 The trial court held that the plaintiff could not. We find no error.
The facts fairly provable under the relevant counts of the complaint 2 are as follows. The named defendant, Gleason Plant Security, Inc. (Gleason), was engaged in the business of providing security guard and patrol services and was employed in this capacity by Ethan Allen Headquarters and Carriage House in Danbury. Gleason employed the defendant, Cornelia Coons, as a road supervisor. While acting in that capacity, Coons parked her vehicle, a company owned car, in the parking lot of Ethan Allen Headquarters at about 6:10 p.m. on a November evening. The parking lot was in close proximity to a neighborhood with a high incidence of crime. Additionally, within the past twenty-four months, in the parking lot, there had been numerous instances of theft of motor vehicles, larceny from motor vehicles, robbery and threatening with a gun. Coons departed from the car, leaving it unattended and unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. Thereafter, Charles E. Thompson and Anthony Wayne Moore stole the car and drove it to the Airport Spirit Shoppe. At about 7:30 p.m., in the course of committing an armed robbery at the store, Thompson and Moore assaulted the plaintiff by shooting him.
The plaintiff sued Gleason and Coons on the theory that Coons was negligent in failing to remove the key from the vehicle, and in leaving it unattended and unlocked in an area where there was a high crime rate and, consequently, a risk that it would be stolen. The plaintiff claimed that Gleason was negligent in failing to require that its employee remove the keys from the ignition of an unattended car, and failing to supervise its employee adequately.
Gleason and Coons moved to strike the first and third counts of the complaint, asserting that they failed to state claims upon which relief could be granted. The court, J. Healey, J., granted the defendants' motion to strike. Judgment was later rendered on these counts by the court, Moraghan, J. The plaintiff appealed from this judgment.
A motion to strike challenges the legal sufficiency of a pleading. Tomczuk v. American Mutual Ins. Co., 9 Conn.App. 194, 196, 517 A.2d 1053 (1986).
We assume arguendo that the complaint sufficiently alleges that the defendants were negligent in leaving the keys in the unlocked car. See, e.g., Anderson v. Gengras Motors, Inc., 141 Conn. 688, 691, 109 A.2d 502 (1954); Alberone v. King, 26 Conn.Sup. 98, 213 A.2d 534 (1965); W. Prosser, Torts (4th Ed.) § 33, p. 176. It is clear, moreover, that the complaint sufficiently alleges that the defendant's negligence was a cause in fact, or "but for" cause, of the plaintiff's injuries. We conclude, however, that the defendants' negligence could not have been the proximate cause of the plaintiff's injuries, because the conduct of Thompson and Moore was, as a matter of law, a superseding cause of the plaintiff's injuries.
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