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Torts keyed to Best
Seibert v. Vic Regnier Builders, Inc.
Citation:
253 Kan. 540, 856 P.2d 1332 (1993)Facts
Betsy Seibert and her friend, Michelle Brandes, drove to the Ranch Mart Shopping Center one evening in Brandes’s Corvette. Getting out of the car in the shopping center’s underground parking garage, the two women were held up at gunpoint by unknown assailants. There was conflicting evidence about what happened next, but Seibert claimed that she dropped a can of cola during the hold up, leading to one of the assailants shooting her.
Seibert sued Vic Regnier Builders, Inc., the owner of the shopping center, for negligently failing to protect its customers. Seibert claimed that the defendant owed a duty to protect its patrons, because of both evidence of past crimes in the above-ground part of the parking area and the dimly-lit nature of the parking garage. The trial court granted summary judgment for the defendants, applying the “prior similar incidents rule“, which established a business’s duty to protect patrons only when violent crime has occurred in the same location that would lead the business to reasonably foresee that crime happening again. In denying the plaintiff’s claim, the court ruled that the past crimes in the above-ground parking areas of the parking lot were too loosely-tied to the crime to impose a duty to protect on the defendant. Seibert appealed, arguing that a “totality of the circumstances” test should apply to the present case.
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