Reed v. Danville Concrete Products Co.
Decision Date | 10 December 1981 |
Docket Number | No. 16997,16997 |
Citation | 57 Ill.Dec. 707,429 N.E.2d 605,102 Ill.App.3d 205 |
Parties | , 57 Ill.Dec. 707 Warren REED, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. DANVILLE CONCRETE PRODUCTS CO., a corporation, et al., Defendants-Appellees. |
Court | United States Appellate Court of Illinois |
Thomas A. Clancy, Mullen, Clancy & Associates, Chicago, for plaintiff-appellant.
Ralph J. Swanson, Sebat, Swanson, Banks, Lessen & Garman, Danville, for defendants-appellees.
This negligence action arises out of injuries suffered by a worker during the construction of a house. The underlying facts here are not in dispute: the plaintiff, employed by a carpentry contractor, fell from a scaffold onto drainage tiles that another contractor had left at the work site. The trial court dismissed the complaint for failing to state a cause of action. We reverse.
On review the only question before us is the legal sufficiency of the complaint; a motion to dismiss admits all well pleaded allegations. (Richards v. Leimbacher (1971), 131 Ill.App.2d 775, 267 N.E.2d 523.) One or some or all three of the defendants installed a septic tank at the house. The complaint charges the defendants with negligence for leaving drainage tiles near the house "in an area where a scaffold was erected" and for not removing the tiles and other debris upon the completion of the sewer system. These allegations signify the defendants' sole connection with the accident; the defendants did not erect the scaffold, employ the plaintiff, or cause him to fall. Two of the three defendants moved to be dismissed from this case because they had not existed at the time of the accident; the trial court never ruled on this motion. We construe the complaint to mean that the tiles were left near the house after the scaffold had already been erected there.
The defendants cite four cases where persons fell into holes or onto objects; all four held that the places where the plaintiffs landed did not proximately cause the falls. (Carr v. Lee J. Behl Hotel Corp. (1944), 321 Ill.App. 432, 53 N.E.2d 295 ( ); Aikens v. George W. Clayton Trust Com. (1955), 132 Colo. 374, 288 P.2d 349 ( ); Barber v. John C. Kohler Co. (1968), 428 Pa. 219, 237 A.2d 224 ( ); Frisch v. Texas Co. (1950), 363 Pa. 619, 70 A.2d 290 ( ).) Aikens and Frisch both observed, however, that the defendants could not have reasonably foreseen that these accidents would occur. We agree with the dissenters in Barber that the cause of the harm rather than the cause of the fall is the crucial question. We note that Illinois Pattern Jury Instructions, Civil No. 15.01 (2d ed. 1971) defines "proximate cause" as a cause that "in natural or probable sequence, produced the injury complained of."
We reject Carr's distinction between conditions and causes; in that case the court construed the unlatched door as a "condition." Under this theory, one who only sets the stage for an accident is not liable when another person or source supplies the force that sets everything in motion....
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