Two new California appellate decisions continue the courts’ ongoing exploration of the scope of duties of care. In one case, the court finds that a hospital could not be held liable for the emotional distress that a patient’s adult daughter suffered upon discovering that she had not been notified of her mother’s death and cremation. In the second case, the court found that a school district owed no duty to prevent a six year old student from being struck and injured by an automobile while crossing a street adjacent to her school after being dismissed for the day.
In the hospital case, Spates v. Dameron Hospital Assn. (Dec. 11, 2003), Case No. C043762, the plaintiff had visited her aging mother in defendant hospital most recently some 9 months prior to her mother’s death. Although the daughter had left information concerning her current address on that visit, the information was not contained in the hospital’s main file relating to her mother. When the mother died, the hospital tried the number it had in its main file and contacted the convalescent facility at which the mother had been living; none of those efforts led to the daughter’s current location. Not having found the next of kin, the hospital turned the remains over to the county coroner, who eventually disposed of them by cremation. The Court of Appeal concluded that the hospital’s efforts to locate plaintiff had been reasonable, that its actions in then turning the remains over to the coroner were authorized by law, and that there existed no “direct relationship” between the hospital and plaintiff that would allow plaintiff to recover emotional distress damages arising from the hospital’s alleged negligence. The decision can be found at these links in PDF and Word formats.
In the school case, 6-year old Norma Guerrero had been dismissed with the rest of her class at the usual time of 2:00 in the afternoon. Her older brother Miguel’s 4th grade class was dismissed on schedule at 2:25. While he and Norma were waiting to be picked up, Miguel crossed the street to see a toy being played with by another student. Norma followed, then returned across the street toward the school. On that return crossing, Norma was struck and injured by an automobile. The court concluded that the school’s duty of care ended when Norma had been released in due course in the company of her older sibling.
In order for this court to construct a duty of care under the circumstances, we would have to conclude that the responsibility to ‘exercise reasonable care in permitting students to leave school premises’ . . . continues until the children have been safely picked up or perhaps safely returned home in the case of those who may walk home. No case has created such a sweeping responsibility for our public schools and we decline to be the first to do so.
Rejecting the position of the dissenting judge that the school district had been negligent while Norma was still on the school’s premises, the majority added:
There is no evidence of any act, or failure to act, by school personnel while Norma was on school grounds that could be described as negligent. Indeed, the record shows that Norma was kept on school grounds until her older siblings were released from school. At that point Norma was routinely released with her siblings to leave the school and await pick up by her parent at the designated place. There is no evidence the District undertook any duty to supervise Norma until she was safely united with her parent and nothing to show that it erred in the manner in which Norma was released from school on the date of the accident.
While a broad duty to ensure that each child either arrives home safely or is picked up by a parent might well advance the interests of child safety, the majority could find no basis for such a broad duty in the controlling statutes, and declined to adopt so broadly expansive a rule on its own.
The opinion in Guererro v. South Bay Union School District (Dec. 12, 2003), Case No. D040351 can be found at these links in PDF and Word formats.
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