Ford v. Ford Motor Co.

• Citation: 585 S.W.3d 317
• Decision Date: 25 June 2019
• Docket Number: WD 81832
• Parties: Lisa Ann FORD and David Jacob Ford, Respondents, v. FORD MOTOR COMPANY, Appellant.
• Court: Court of Appeal of Missouri (US)

585 S.W.3d 317

Lisa Ann FORD and David Jacob Ford, Respondents,
v.
FORD MOTOR COMPANY, Appellant.

WD 81832

Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District.

Filed: June 25, 2019
Application for Transfer Denied October 29, 2019

John F. Murphy, Robert T. Adams, Jennifer J. ARtman, Kansas City for appellant.

Michael S. Ketchmark, Scott A. McCreight, Benjamin H. Fadler, Leawood, for respondents.

Before Division Two: Edward R. Ardini, P.J., and Alok Ahuja and Gary D. Witt, JJ.

Alok Ahuja, Judge

David Ford’s wife and son (the "Plaintiffs") brought a wrongful death suit against Ford Motor Company after Mr. Ford died as a result of injuries he suffered while working as a contractor at Ford Motor’s Kansas City Assembly Plant. Mr. Ford was delivering vehicle seats to the plant when he was crushed between a stationary guard rail and a moving piece of machinery. The Plaintiffs alleged that Ford Motor was negligent for failing to remove or barricade the dangerous pinch point, or to effectively warn visitors of its existence. After an eight-day trial in the Circuit Court of Clay County, a jury found Ford Motor to have 95% comparative fault for Mr. Ford’s injuries, and awarded the Plaintiffs $ 38 million in compensatory damages. The jury awarded the Plaintiffs an additional $ 38 million in aggravating circumstances damages.

Ford Motor appeals. It argues that the circuit court erred by:

(1) preventing a key Ford Motor witness from testifying because he had not been adequately disclosed during discovery;

(2) failing to direct a verdict for Ford Motor on the basis that Mr. Ford was a trespasser in the part of the plant where he was injured;

(3) refusing to submit an instruction requiring the jury to determine whether Mr. Ford was trespassing;

(4) failing to direct a verdict for Ford Motor on the basis that the pinch point presented an "open and obvious" danger;

(5) refusing to submit a jury instruction on the "open and obvious" issue;

(6) submitting an erroneous aggravating circumstances instruction; and

(7) admitting evidence of other incidents involving the equipment which caused Mr. Ford’s injuries.

We affirm.

Factual Background¹

David Ford was killed when he was crushed by machinery in the Kansas City Assembly Plant operated by Ford Motor

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in Claycomo, where Ford Motor assembles its F-150 model pickup truck. Mr. Ford was not employed by Ford Motor. Instead, he worked as a delivery driver for Walkenhorst Transportation, a trucking company. Walkenhorst had contracted with Ford Motor to deliver vehicle seats (manufactured by Johnson Controls in Riverside) to the Claycomo plant.

The Claycomo plant operated twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. Walkenhorst delivered seats to the plant in a constant loop, so that Ford Motor had an uninterrupted supply of seats during the entire duration of the assembly plant’s operating hours. The seats delivered by Walkenhorst would be immediately integrated into the vehicle assembly process. On arrival at the Claycomo plant, Walkenhorst’s delivery trucks would back into a loading dock, where pallets of seats were removed by a piece of equipment called a "seat stripper." The seat stripper consisted of an L-shaped pair of conveyor lines. The seat stripper operated in conjunction with a number of dual-pronged, ceiling-mounted carriers which resembled the mast system of a forklift. The carriers would pick up pallets of seats from a lift table at the end of one of the seat stripper’s conveyor lines. The carriers would convey the pallets of seats to the assembly line so that the seats could be installed into trucks. Once the seats were delivered to the assembly line, the carriers would return the empty pallets to a lift table on the second conveyor line of the seat stripper. After the empty pallets were removed, the carriers crossed a gap between the lift tables at the end of the seat stripper’s two conveyor lines, in order to pick up new pallets loaded with vehicle seats. A dangerous "pinch point" existed where the carriers traveled across the gap from one lift table to the other.

Evidence indicated that the seat stripper was one of the oldest pieces of equipment in the plant at the time of Mr. Ford’s injury. One of the Plaintiffs' experts testified that the seat stripper was "a cobbled-together and inferior piece of equipment." The testimony indicated that the seat stripper frequently jammed, and had to be cleared by repositioning seats or pallets. Even when the seat stripper and carrier system were not malfunctioning, the testimony indicated that the carrier system frequently and unpredictably stopped, sometimes for several minutes at a time, and then resumed operation without any type of warning to workers. One of the Plaintiffs' experts, Franklin Darius, testified that "[e]rratic motion or intermittent motion is much more dangerous than consistent motion"; he testified that "if [machinery] can stop for a long period of time and then suddenly move without warning, it'll catch people by surprise." Darius testified that, unless it was physically isolated from workers, the carrier system should have issued an audible and/or visible alarm whenever it resumed its motion: "[i]f there’s a possibility of a human being [getting] caught off guard by the movement of the conveyor system, there must be an alarm of some type."

Mr. Ford was injured at the Kansas City Assembly Plant on December 8, 2015. At the time, he had been delivering seats to the plant for only 13 days. While delivering seats on December 8, Mr. Ford entered the area between the seat stripper’s two conveyor lines to manually clear a fault or jam in the system. After telling a Ford Motor employee that he had cleared the fault, Mr. Ford stepped into the "pinch point" between the lift tables. Mr. Ford was pinned against a stationary guard rail by one of the dual-pronged carriers crossing from one of the seat stripper’s lift tables to the other. A forensic pathologist retained by Plaintiffs, Dr. Judy Melinek, testified that the amount of force inflicted on Mr. Ford was comparable to the force

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inflicted in a "high-velocity motor vehicle accident[ ]" at approximately fifty or sixty miles per hour, or when an individual falls from a four-story building.

As a result of the crushing injury, Mr. Ford suffered fractures of his sternum, multiple ribs, and multiple thoracic vertebrae. The compression of Mr. Ford’s thorax transected his inferior vena cava vein, and the vein had largely separated from the right atrium of his heart, causing massive bleeding in the pericardium, and compressing Mr. Ford’s heart muscle. Mr. Ford underwent extensive open-heart surgery immediately following his injury.

Dr. Melinek testified that the amount of "bone-crushing pain" Mr. Ford experienced at the time of the accident caused him to lose consciousness. Although sedated, Mr. Ford was responsive to his family members and "not completely unconscious" following his thoracic surgery. Mr. Ford’s surviving spouse, Plaintiff Lisa Ford, testified that "[h]e was in a lot of pain" while hospitalized; she testified that, "[i]t’s not anything that you ever want to see." Mr. Ford was on a ventilator from the time of his surgery until the time of his death. Mr. Ford died on December 15, 2015, as a result of the traumatic blunt-force injuries he sustained on December 8.

On January 6, 2016, Mr. Ford’s wife and son filed a wrongful death petition in the Circuit Court of Clay County against Ford Motor, in which they sought both compensatory and aggravating circumstances damages. The petition alleged that "[a]t all times relevant to this Petition, David Scott Ford was an invitee at the Ford Motor assembly plant." The petition alleged that the "conveyor belt and surrounding area of Ford Motor’s assembly plant was not reasonably safe, in that it could cause serious injury to any person who was caught within the belt." The petition alleged that Mr. Ford’s injuries were a "direct and proximate result of the negligence, carelessness, failure and violations of Ford Motor to exercise ordinary care ... to remove the dangerous condition on its property and/or to warn visitors such as David Scott Ford of its existence."

An eight-day jury trial was held beginning on February 13, 2018. At trial, a key issue was whether Mr. Ford was authorized to enter the seat stripper system or whether he was an unauthorized trespasser at the location where he was injured. Although Ford Motor presented several witnesses who testified that Walkenhorst drivers were not authorized to enter the seat stripper, Plaintiffs introduced evidence that Walkenhorst drivers routinely entered the machine, that Ford Motor expected the Walkenhorst drivers to clear jams in the seat stripper themselves without summoning Ford Motor employees, and that Ford Motor managers and employees were aware of this practice. Thus, David Martin, the former Head of Operations at Walkenhorst, testified that a delivery driver could "seldom get through a trailer load without having to [access the seat stripper area], and pull a pallet or something that would get lodged in there sideways or stuck." Martin testified that Ford Motor managers witnessed Walkenhorst’s drivers accessing the interior portion of the seat stripper system, and that occasionally Ford Motor employees would assist the Walkenhorst drivers in...