Volpe v. Gallagher

• Decision Date: 12 May 2003
• Docket Number: No. 2001-463-Appeal.,2001-463-Appeal.
• Parties: Raymond VOLPE et al. v. James Andrew GALLAGHER et al.
• Court: Rhode Island Supreme Court

821 A.2d 699

Raymond VOLPE et al. v. James Andrew GALLAGHER et al.

No. 2001-463-Appeal.

Supreme Court of Rhode Island.

May 12, 2003.

Present: WILLIAMS, C.J., FLANDERS, GOLDBERG, and SHEA (Ret.) JJ.

Stephen A. Rodio, Providence, Karen Lewis Davidson, for plaintiff.

Ralph DellaRosa, East Providence, for Defendant.

OPINION

FLANDERS, Justice.

"Who knew?" In essence, that was the defense to the charge of negligence in this lawsuit. The plaintiffs, Raymond Volpe and Joyce Almonte, accused the homeowner-defendant, Sara Gallagher (defendant), of negligently allowing her adult son, James Andrew Gallagher (Gallagher), who was mentally ill, to keep guns and ammunition on her property. On July 3, 1994, Gallagher misused these firearms to shoot and kill Ronald Volpe (victim), the plaintiffs' next of kin and the defendant's next-door neighbor. But the defendant asserted that she did not know that her son kept guns or ammunition on her property, much less could she have foreseen that he would use them to murder their next-door neighbor.

As of July 3, 1994 — the date of the murder — Gallagher had lived with defendant in her small North Providence ranch house for the entire thirty-four years of his life. A jobless and practically friendless loner who was plagued by hallucinations, imaginary conversants, and a paranoid distrust of others, Gallagher had suffered for many years from an increasingly severe and delusional mental illness. Nevertheless, while he was living in defendant's house, he also kept on the premises a shotgun, a pistol, boxes of ammunition, and related gun paraphernalia. On the date in question, for no known reason, Gallagher suddenly emerged from the basement of defendant's home — a place where he spent long hours by himself — with his loaded shotgun in hand. The victim, his next-door neighbor, apparently was trimming the hedge between their two houses.

After discharging the shotgun three times into the victim's head and body, Gallagher returned, shotgun in hand, to his lair in the basement of defendant's home, leaving the victim's dead body facedown in the hedges. The record does not disclose whether Gallagher shot the victim from defendant's property or crossed the boundary line between the nearby abutting house lots before doing so. After hearing the gunshots, defendant stood at her side door as Gallagher, brushing by her on his way back down to the basement, admitted that he had just shot the victim. Thinking that her son just might be hallucinating again, but troubled by the "fireworks" she had heard, defendant telephoned her two daughters who lived nearby and asked them to come over to the house right away. They did so, and quickly enlisted the help of a neighbor. Walking over to the hedges that bordered the chockablock Volpe and Gallagher houses, the neighbor soon discovered the victim's body, and then telephoned the police. Meanwhile, one of defendant's daughters — after Gallagher had rebuffed her attempt to retrieve the shotgun from the basement — entered his bedroom, removed a handgun from a dresser drawer, and hid it under a pillow on the living-room couch until the police arrived and arrested Gallagher.

In due course, plaintiffs brought this wrongful-death lawsuit against defendant, accusing her of negligence in allowing her mentally ill son to keep and store guns and ammunition on her property. They also attempted to sue the incarcerated Gallagher, but he did not testify orotherwise participate in the trial of this civil case. Charged with first-degree murder by the state, Gallagher eventually dropped his insanity defense and pled nolo contendere to a reduced criminal charge of second-degree murder. During the trial of this civil action, Gallagher remained imprisoned for this crime. And even though plaintiffs also sued defendant's adult daughters, the parties settled these claims before the trial.

According to plaintiffs, defendant knew or should have known that, by allowing her mentally ill son to possess guns and ammunition while he was residing with her at her house and exhibiting paranoid and delusional behavior, she created an unreasonable risk of bodily harm to others. In effect, they maintained, by permitting Gallagher to combine what his psychologist sister believed was "paranoid schizophrenia" with gun possession on her property, defendant concocted a sure-fire recipe for disaster, for which she functioned as the de facto mixmaster. Although she grudgingly admitted at trial to knowing that her son was mentally disturbed ("I knew he wasn't right. I just didn't know what was wrong with him;" "[he] just wasn't acting right. He always wanted to be alone in darkness. * * * He was acting peculiar."), defendant insisted that she had no idea that he possessed any guns or ammunition, much less that he kept such firearms in her house. According to defendant, "I just wouldn't allow anybody to have guns in the house. I was afraid of them, and didn't want them." Moreover, she argued, because her son had no history of violence, she could not have foreseen that one day he would shoot their next-door neighbor to death using any of the guns and ammunition that he kept at her house. But after listening to her testify and after sorting through the other evidence presented during a Superior Court trial, a jury rejected defendant's no-knowledge-of-any-guns stance as incredible and returned a verdict in favor of the victim's family. The jury found that defendant was negligent in allowing such a mentally disturbed, paranoid, and delusional person to possessand store guns, ammunition, and related paraphernalia on her property — including the murder weapon that he used to commit this heinous crime on the day in question.

The trial justice, however, ultimately granted defendant's motion for a new trial, thereby overturning the verdict. Although she had thrice denied defendant's motions for judgment as a matter of law — most recently after the jury returned its negligence verdict against defendant — the trial justice changed her mind after doing so. Ultimately, she concluded, absent any evidence of previous violent behavior on Gallagher's part, defendant breached no duty that she owed to her next-door neighbors when she failed to disarm her son or otherwise control his arms-bearing activity on her property. Thus, according to the trial justice, because no negligence finding was possible in this case, she had erred as a matter of law in letting this case go to the jury. Moreover, she ruled, even if defendant knew that her mentally disturbed son was keeping guns and ammunition at her house, she owed no legal duty to the neighboring victim because she could not have foreseen that her son would use any of these firearms to murder him — at least without any evidence of similar previous incidents or a violent history to signal her that he was capable of such an act.

Citing to defendant's breach of the common-law duties that property possessors have to prevent licensees such as Gallagher from conducting themselves on a possessor's property in a manner that would create an unreasonable risk of bodily harm to others and to maintain their property in a reasonably safe condition, plaintiffs appeal from the order granting defendant a new trial on this basis.

Analysis

"[F]or this Court to determine whether a trial justice has abused his or her discretion concerning the grant or denial of a new trial based on an error of law occurring at the trial, wemust review that grant and the accompanying trial record before us de novo, as we do for other questions of law." Votolato v. Merandi, 747 A.2d 455, 460 (R.I.2000).

In this case, the trial justice believed that she had committed an error of law that constituted grounds for a new trial. She had instructed the jury pursuant to the legal standards set forth in the Restatement (Second) Torts § 318 (1965) (restatement),¹ and the jury then found defendant liable. But absent a track record of violence for Gallagher, the trial justice reasoned, no such legal duty existed in these circumstances. Therefore, she ruled, she should not have let this case go to the jury because it was not foreseeable that defendant's son would use any of the guns and ammunition he kept on defendant's property in such a violent and deadly manner.

For the reasons enumerated below, we respectfully disagree and, consequently, reverse the granting of defendant's motion for new trial.

I As a Possessor of Residential Property, Defendant Owed a Duty to her Next-Door Neighbor Concerning Dangerous Activities Conducted on her Property by a Third Party

"The existence of a legal duty is purely a question of law, and the court alone is required to make this determination." Kuzniar v. Keach, 709 A.2d 1050, 1055 (R.I.1998).

"A legal duty is an obligation imposed by the law upon a person. It requires that person to conform his or her actions to a particular standard. And it also carries with it a recognition that the law will enforce this duty to the benefit of other individuals to whom this duty is owed. Put another way, the existence of a legal duty depends on whether the interest that a defendant has allegedly invaded is entitled to legal protection." Id.

"[N]o clear-cut formula * * * exists" for making this determination. Hennessey v. Pyne, 694 A.2d 691, 697 (R.I.1997) (quoting Kenney Manufacturing Co. v. Starkweather & Shepley, Inc., 643 A.2d 203, 206 (R.I.1994)). Rather, "[u]nder our ad hoc approach we consider all relevant factors, including the relationship of the parties, the scope and burden of the obligation to be imposed upon the defendant, public policy considerations, and notions of fairness." Id. As this Court has frequently noted, "[t]he `risk reasonably to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed, and risk imports relation; it is risk to another or to others within the range of apprehension.'" Id. at 697. (Emphasis in original.)

Although this Court never has confronted a...