Edwards v. Honeywell, Inc., 94-2346

Decision Date11 April 1995
Docket NumberNo. 94-2346,94-2346
Citation50 F.3d 484
PartiesDebra Jo EDWARDS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. HONEYWELL, INCORPORATED, and Honeywell Protection Services, Defendants-Appellees.
CourtU.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

W. Scott Montross (argued), Townsend, Hovde & Montross, Indianapolis, IN, David W. Stone, IV, Anderson, IN, Thomas A. Hendrickson, Indianapolis, IN, for plaintiff-appellant Debra Jo Edwards.

Thomas J. Campbell (argued), Thomas R. Schultz, Locke, Reynolds, Boyd & Weisell, Indianapolis, IN, for defendants-appellees Honeywell, Inc., Honeywell Protection Services.

Before POSNER, Chief Judge, and BAUER and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Chief Judge.

A fireman's widow has sued Honeywell, the provider of an alarm system intended to protect the house where her husband was killed in the line of duty. The suit, filed in an Indiana state court, charges that David John Edwards died because of Honeywell's negligence in failing to call the fire department promptly upon receiving a signal from the alarm. As a result of the delay, the floor of the burning house was in a severely weakened condition by the time the firemen entered, and it collapsed beneath Edwards, plunging him to his death. The district court, to which the suit had been removed under the diversity jurisdiction, granted summary judgment for Honeywell. The court held that Honeywell owed no duty of care to fireman Edwards under the common law of Indiana. The widow's appeal requires us to grapple with the elusive concept of "duty" in the law of torts.

In 1982 Honeywell had made a contract with a couple named Baker to install (for $1,875) and monitor (for $21 a month) an alarm system in the Bakers' house. The house is a wood-frame house located in a suburb of Indianapolis and ordinary in every respect except that the Bakers conducted an interior-decorating service out of the basement. The contract limited Honeywell's liability to the Bakers for the consequences of any failure of the system to $250. The validity of this limitation is not questioned. Leon's Bakery, Inc. v. Grinnell Corp., 990 F.2d 44, 48-49 (2d Cir.1993).

The alarm system was of a type that has become common. If the house was entered while the alarm was turned on, and the alarm was not promptly disarmed, or if someone in the house pushed either a "panic button" or a button on the alarm console labeled fire, police, or emergency medical service, a signal was automatically transmitted over the telephone lines to a central station maintained by Honeywell. The person manning the station (called the "alarm monitor") would call the fire department if the fire or medical-emergency button had been pressed, and otherwise would call the police department. After that the alarm monitor would call a neighbor of the subscriber. The contract required the subscriber to inform Honeywell which police and fire department and which neighbor should be notified, and presumably the Bakers had done this back in 1982, though whether accurately or not we do not know. Honeywell does not make any effort to assure the accuracy of, or keep up to date, the information furnished by the subscriber concerning whom to call.

Six years passed. It was now an afternoon in the winter of 1988, and Mrs. Baker was working in the basement with two of the employees of the decorating service when she heard a sound. She looked up and noticed an orange glow in the furnace room. One of the employees opened the door to the room, revealing a shelving unit in the furnace room already engulfed in flames from floor to ceiling. Mrs. Baker ran upstairs and tried to dial 911 but misdialed. She gave up on the phone and pushed two buttons on the control panel of the alarm system. One was the fire button, the other the police button. Then she grabbed her dog and ran out the front door. The two people who had been working in the basement with her fled at the same time; they were the only other people in the house. They drove to their home, which was just a couple of blocks away, to call the fire department, while Mrs. Baker, her sandals slipping on the ice, ran from house to house until she found one in which someone was at home. That person, a babysitter, called the Lawrence Township fire department. The call was placed between one and four minutes after Mrs. Baker triggered the alarm in her house. We must give the plaintiff the benefit of the doubt (her case having been dismissed on a motion for summary judgment) and therefore assume that it was four minutes, in which event, as we are about to see, the township fire department received the babysitter's call no earlier than it received the call from Honeywell's central station. (If the call had been received much earlier, the plaintiff's complaint about Honeywell's delay might be academic.)

The signals from the Bakers' house had come into the central station at 2:54 p.m., triggering an audible alarm. The alarm monitor, hearing it, had pressed a function key, causing the relevant information about the Bakers to flash on the screen of her computer. The display told her to call the Indianapolis Fire Department (Honeywell's policy, if both the police and the fire signals are transmitted by the alarm system, is to call only the fire department). So she pushed the "direct fire button" to the Indianapolis Fire Department, connecting her immediately with the department's dispatcher. She gave the dispatcher the Bakers' address. The dispatcher told her that it was within the jurisdiction of a different fire department, that of the City of Lawrence, to which the dispatcher transferred the call. That was wrong too. It was the fire department of Lawrence Township that had jurisdiction over the Bakers' house. So the dispatcher for the City of Lawrence transferred the call that had been relayed to the City of Lawrence's fire department.

Had Honeywell's operator called the township's fire department first, rather than reaching that department as it were on the third try, it would have taken no more than 45 seconds for the department to learn of the fire at the Bakers' house. Because of the jurisdictional error, it was not until 2:58 that the department received the call. The 45 seconds had been stretched to four minutes because of the misinformation in Honeywell's computer. The plaintiff claims, and for purposes of this appeal we accept, that Honeywell was careless in not having a procedure for verifying and updating such essential information as which fire department to call in the event of a fire in a subscriber's premises, since the boundaries between fire districts are shifted from time to time.

A Lawrence Township fire chief arrived at the scene at 3:00 p.m. (This was remarkably prompt, the call having come in only two minutes earlier. But the Bakers' residence was only a mile or a mile and a half from the firehouse. This shows by the way the importance of notifying the right fire department.) He saw dark smoke but no flames. Mrs. Baker was there and told him that she thought her furnace had exploded. The chief did not ask her when the fire had started but assumed that, because Mrs. Baker had been at home, she had notified the fire department immediately. This implied that the fire was less than three minutes old. Five minutes later, at 3:05 p.m., two parties of firemen began leading hoses into the house, entering through the front door and the garage (which was on the side of the house) respectively. The floor was hot to the touch (firemen customarily enter a burning building on all fours because smoke and heat rise), and the group that had entered through the front door quickly withdrew, fearing that the floor would collapse. The smoke thickened. Fire was seen darting from the roof. Edwards, an experienced fireman, was one of two men who had entered the house from the garage. Sometime between 3:10 and 3:15, before he could withdraw from the house, the floor collapsed and he fell into the basement and was asphyxiated.

The house was severely damaged by the fire, and the Bakers have since moved to another house. They no longer subscribe to Honeywell's alarm service.

We may assume that the firemen would have arrived a little more than three minutes earlier (to be exact, four minutes minus 45 seconds earlier) had Honeywell's call gone to the right fire department directly rather than having to be relayed. Whether fireman Edwards' life would have been saved is obviously a highly speculative question. Robinson v. Southern New England Tel. Co., 140 Conn. 414, 101 A.2d 491, 493 (1953); Pope v. Pinkerton-Hays Lumber Co., 120 So.2d 227, 232 (Fla.App.1960). It depends on what the firemen would have done with the extra three minutes and 15 seconds. If they would have brought the fire under control in that time, then the floor might not have collapsed. But if at the end of that period they would still have been laying their hoses (no water had yet been applied to the fire when the firemen withdrew and the floor collapsed), the floor would have collapsed just as it did and Edwards would have been killed just as he was. Absence of evidence that the delay of which the plaintiff complains made any difference to Edwards' fate was not, however, the ground on which the district judge dismissed the suit. Nor does Honeywell urge it as an alternative ground for affirming the judgment.

Honeywell does urge a related alternative ground, that Edwards would have been killed even if the Bakers hadn't had an alarm system at all, since in its absence it would surely have taken Mrs. Baker four minutes to reach the fire department, the time she took (by the plaintiff's own estimate) to reach the neighbor's house and get the babysitter to call. This is not so clear as Honeywell makes out. Before fleeing the house, Mrs. Baker pressed the alarm buttons. Had there been no alarm buttons, she might have redialed 911. (She knew her mistake. She had...

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