Stripling v. Armbrester
| Decision Date | 01 June 1984 |
| Parties | George W. STRIPLING v. Robert A. ARMBRESTER; Jackson Realty Co., A Corporation; Real Evans; Charles Mathews, d/b/a Mathews Cafeteria; et al. 82-973. |
| Court | Alabama Supreme Court |
Bryant A. Whitmire, Jr., Birmingham, for appellant.
Robert M. Girardeau of Huie, Fernambucq & Stewart, Birmingham, for appellees Jackson Realty Co., Robert Armbrester, and A.A. Evans.
Dick Nave of Furner, Boyce & Nave, Homewood, for appellee Charles Mathews d/b/a Mathews Cafeteria.
This is an appeal from the grant of summary judgment in favor of the owner, managing agents, and a tenant of a shopping center who were sued by a business invitee whose car was stolen from the shopping center parking lot.
On September 4, 1982, at approximately 6:00 p.m., George W. Stripling parked his car in the Mountain Brook Shopping Center parking lot adjacent to Mathews Cafeteria, one of the businesses in the shopping center. After locking his car, Stripling and his wife entered the cafeteria to eat dinner. When Stripling returned to the space where he had parked his car, he discovered that his automobile was missing. He immediately called the Mountain Brook Police Department, and an incident report was made. Shortly thereafter, his automobile was discovered within the City of Birmingham. The automobile had been vandalized and stripped.
On November 1, 1982, Stripling filed suit in Jefferson Circuit Court against Robert A. Armbrester, Jackson Realty Co., Real Evans, Charles Mathews d/b/a Mathews Cafeteria, 1 and certain fictitious parties. The complaint alleged that the defendants were aware of other automobile thefts occurring in the Mountain Brook Shopping Center parking lot, that they were negligent in failing to provide appropriate security measures and in failing to inform the public of this dangerous condition, and that their negligence proximately caused the theft of Stripling's car from this parking lot.
The defendants filed an answer denying each allegation of the complaint. In response to interrogatories, the defendants denied having any knowledge of prior automobile thefts from the Mountain Brook Shopping Center parking lot. The defendants stated that their occasional use of off-duty Mountain Brook police officers in the parking lot was for the sole purpose of controlling a problem of limited parking and not for the deterrence of possible criminal activity.
The defendants also filed a motion for summary judgment. Stripling filed a motion in opposition to the summary judgment motion and attached the affidavit of a Mountain Brook police officer who stated that two other auto thefts had occurred in the Mountain Brook Shopping Center parking lot only two months prior to the theft of Stripling's car. The officer also stated that in the past five years there had been several purse snatchings, two robberies, and a kidnapping, all of which had occurred in or around the parking lot. The officer concluded that the close proximity of the parking lot to the entrance ramp of Highway 280 made the lot particularly susceptible to crime.
The court granted summary judgment in favor of all the defendants, and Stripling's appeal to this Court followed.
Our review of the grant of summary judgment in this case is controlled by the recent decision of Latham v. Aronov Realty Co., 435 So.2d 209 (Ala.1983).
In Latham, supra, a business invitee who was criminally assaulted in the parking lot of a shopping mall by third parties sued the owners of the mall, the rental agent, and the security service hired to guard the mall, to recover damages for the injuries resulting from his assault.
Latham argued that he had presented evidence "more than sufficient to give rise to a reasonable inference that the defendants knew or should have known about the dangerous condition that existed in an area over which they exercised control, and thus [that] the granting of the directed verdict was error." La...
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