In this case, the national organization was also sued for failing to instruct and enforce the regional organization in the rules, regulations, standards or policies. If you are going to make rules, and you say the rules must be followed you have to make sure you train in the rules and that everyone follows the rules.
If you make a rule you have to enforce it if you are in charge of making rules.
Otherwise, don’t make rules!
T.K., a minor, v. Boys & Girls Clubs of America, et. al. 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 87005
State: Illinois, United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois, Springfield Division
Plaintiff: T.K., a minor, by and through his natural Father and Next Friend, Timothy Killings, and Timothy Killings, individually
Defendant: Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Boys and Girls Club of Decatur, Inc., and Mary K. Paulin
Plaintiff Claims: negligence and willful and wanton misconduct
Defendant Defenses: Failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted filed in a Motion to dismiss
Holding: for the plaintiff
Year: 2017
This case is a federal diversity case. That means the plaintiff(s) and the defendant(s) were legally residents of different states, and the amount claimed by the plaintiff was greater than $75,000.00. In this case, the plaintiff was from California, and the Defendant was located in Illinois.
The plaintiff was in Illinois and attending the Decatur Boys & Girls Club, which was part of the America Boys & Girls Club. America Boys & Girls Club was based in Georgia.
America Boys & Girls Club provided policies, procedures, rules, guidelines and instructions to the Decatur Boys & Girls Clubs, and all other Boys & Girls Clubs. The Boys & Girls Clubs are required to follow the operating policies, procedures, rules, guidelines, and instructions.
While attending the club, the plaintiff was taken to a local farm. Neither of the defendants had permission to transport the minor plaintiff to the farm. While there the plaintiff was riding on a trailer (probably a hay ride)that did not have guardrails, seats, seatbelts or other equipment designed from keeping people from falling off. (But then very few hay rides do.) The tractor and trailer were pulled onto a public highway with 15-20 children on it. While on the highway the plaintiff either jumped or fell off or might have been pushed
off sustaining injuries.
The farm trailer was not designed or intended to transport people, and the trailer lacked guardrails, seats, seatbelts, and other equipment that might prevent people from falling off it. Defendant Paulin pulled the trailer, with T.K. and 15 to 20 additional children riding on it, onto a public highway with a tractor defendant.
The issue that the trailer was not designed to be on a highway and did not have seats, seatbelts or other equipment to keep people from falling off was repeatedly brought up by the court.
The defendants filed a motion to dismiss, and this opinion is court’s response to that motion.
Analysis: making sense of the law based on these facts.
A motion to dismiss is a preliminary motion filed when the allegations in the complaint do not meet the minimum requirements to make a legally recognizable claim.
“To survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.” Plausibility means alleging factual content that allows a court to reasonably infer that the defendant is liable for the alleged misconduct. A plaintiff’s complaint must suggest a right to relief, “raising that possibility above a speculative level.” “The required level of factual specificity rises with the complexity of the claim.”
When reviewing a motion to dismiss the court must look at the plaintiff’s pleadings as true and any inference that must be drawn from the pleadings is done so in favor of the plaintiff.
To plead negligence under Illinois’s law the plaintiff must prove “…that the defendant owed plaintiff a duty, it breached that duty, and the breach proximately caused plaintiff’s injury.” In Illinois, every person owes all other persons “a duty to exercise ordinary care to guard against injury which naturally flows as a reasonably probable and foreseeable consequence of his act.”
Whether this duty arises in a particular context depends on “the reasonable foreseeability of the injury, the likelihood of the injury, the magnitude of the burden of guarding against the injury, and the consequences of placing the burden on defendants.” Id. A child’s caretaker has a duty to protect the child from harm.
It is a legal question to be decided by the court if a legal duty exists.
…the relationship between him and America Boys & Girls Club and Decatur Boys & Girls Club imposed on the two organizations a duty of care to adequately supervise him and protect him from harm, any unreasonable risk of harm, dangerous instrumentalities, and dangerous conditions.
The plaintiffs argued the duty of care of the two organizations was breached by:
(1) negligently supervising him, (2) allowing and causing him to be placed on a farm trailer that was not designed for transporting children and was therefore dangerous and not reasonably safe for him, (3) failing to warn or failing to adequately warn him of the potential for injury before putting him on the trailer, (4) failing to properly supervise the minors they placed on the trailer, and (5) failing to provide enough staff members to monitor the children they placed on the trailer.
The plaintiff’s also argued there was a greater responsibility and as such duty on the part of the America Boys & Girls Club to train the Decatur club on its rules, regulations and policies and failing to train on them was also negligent.
T.K. further alleges that it failed to properly train Decatur Boys & Girls Club on the operating policies, procedures, rules, guidelines, and instructions of America Boys & Girls Club, and that it failed to supervise Decatur Boys & Girls Club to ensure that the operating policies, procedures, rules, guidelines, and instructions were followed.
In this case, the duty of care was created by the rules, regulations, policies and procedures created by the America Boys & Girls Clubs upon the Decatur Boys & Girls Club.
The plaintiff went on to argue, and since it was quoted by the court, accepted by the court that:
Defendant Paulin put him on the farm trailer even though Defendant Paulin did not have the requisite permission to give him a ride on the trailer. Defendant Paulin towed the trailer, while T.K. and 15 to 20 additional children were on board, with a tractor onto a public highway. According to T.K., Defendant Paulin owed him a duty of care to protect him from any unreasonable risk of harm and breached that duty by (1) allowing and causing him to be placed on a farm trailer that was not designed for transporting children and was therefore dangerous and not reasonably safe for him; (2)
failing to warn him of the potential for injury before putting him on the trailer and pulling the trailer onto a public highway; (3) failing to warn him that the trailer was dangerous and not reasonably safe given that the trailer had no railings, barriers, walls, or seats; and (4) creating a dangerous condition by placing him on the trailer and pulling it onto a public highway.
The court held this was enough to create a duty of care and proved a possible negligence claim.
Furthermore, of note was a statement that a statutory violation of a statute in Illinois does not create a negligence per se claim.
A violation of a statute or ordinance designed to protect human life or property is prima facie evidence of negligence. . . . The violation does not constitute negligence per se, however, and therefore the defendant may prevail by showing that he acted reasonably under the circumstances.”
The court then looked at the minor plaintiff’s father claims to see if those met the requirements to prove negligence in Illinois.
To state a negligence cause of action, Mr. Killings must plead enough facts to make it plausible that he was harmed as a proximate result of Defendants’ breach of a duty they owed to him.
However, the father was not able to prove his claim because it is separate and distinct from the minor’s claim. “The fact that Defendants were responsible for T.K.’s well-being on July 17, 2015, does not mean that Defendants had any duty to Mr. Killings.”
It was T.K., not Mr. Killings, who was placed on an unsafe farm trailer and pulled onto a public road. Defendants, therefore, had a duty to exercise ordinary care to prevent injury to T.K., not Mr. Killings. Further, Mr. Killings does not claim that he was physically injured as a result of Defendants’ negligence; his only claimed injury is the money he has spent and the money he will spend in the future for T.K.’s past and future medical treatment. In short, Mr. Killings has not met the pleading requirements for a negligence claim against any Defendant.
The father also pleaded a claim for loss of aid, comfort, society and companionship of his child. However, Illinois’s law does not allow for recovery of those emotional damages unless the child’s injury is a fatality.
The claim is not one for damages stemming from the child’s physical injury, but one founded on the parents’ liability for the minor’s medical expenses under the Illinois Family Expense Act.
However, the father did have a claim for the medical expenses the father paid on behalf of his minor son for the injuries he incurred.
The plaintiff also pleaded res ipsa loquitur.
Res ipsa loquitur allows “proof of negligence by circumstantial evidence when the direct evidence concerning cause of injury is primarily within the knowledge and control of the defendant.” The doctrine “is meant to bridge an evidentiary gap when an injury could not have happened but for the defendant’s negligence.” Accordingly, res ipsa lo-quitur applies only when the facts “admit of the single inference that the accident would not have happened unless the defendant had been negligent.”
Res ipsa loquitur is a claim that when an incident has occurred, the control of the instrumentality was solely within the control of the defendant.
Under Illinois law, a plaintiff bringing a negligence claim based on the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur must plead that he was injured “in an occurrence that ordinarily does not happen in the absence of negligence” and that it was caused “by an agency or instrumentality within the defendant’s exclusive control.
An example of res ipsa loquitur is a passenger in an airplane that crashes. The pilot is the defendant, and the
control of the airplane is solely with the pilot.
Indeed, the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur can be appropriate if the instrument that caused the injury was in the defendant’s exclusive control “at a time prior to the injury and there is no change in conditions or intervening act that could reasonably have caused the event resulting in the injury.
However, the allegations of the plaintiff did not meet the requirements of res ipsa loquitur in Illinois.
Plaintiff’s final allegation discussed in the opinion was one for willful and wanton misconduct on the part of the defendants. Under Illinois’s law to establish a claim for willful and wanton conduct, the plaintiff must.
…plead facts establishing the elements of a negligence claim–duty, breach, proximate causation, and harm–and “either a deliberate intention to harm or an utter indifference to or conscious disregard for the welfare of the plaintiff.
Generally, this is the same standard to prove willful and wanton conduct in most states. Once the negligence claim is proved, then the allegations only need to support the additional acts as willful and wanton.
Therefore, to state claims for willful and wanton misconduct against Defendants, T.K. need only additionally allege either intentional or reckless willful and wanton misconduct committed by Defendants.
The court defined willful and wanton conduct.
Reckless willful and wanton misconduct is conduct committed with an utter indifference of or a conscious disregard for the safety of others. To meet this standard, the defendant “must be conscious of his conduct, and, though having no intent to injure, must be conscious, from his knowledge of the surrounding circumstances and existing conditions, that his conduct will naturally and probably result in injury.
With the allegations plead, the court found sufficient information to confirm the plaintiff going forward with willful and wanton claims. Those allegations include:
Decatur Boys & Girls Club and America Boys & Girls Club placed him and 15 to 20 other minors on an unsafe farm trailer with no guardrails, sidewalls, barriers, or seats while providing inadequate supervision. T.K. further alleges that the trailer was not designed to transport people.
Putting kids on a trailer was a major issue for the court. Kids on a highway on a vehicle not created to transport people were enough to create willful and wanton conduct.
The defendant argued that the allegations that created the negligence claim were also allowed to be the same facts. No new allegations needed to be plead to support the claims for willful and wanton conduct.
Under Illinois’s law, “[t]he same acts by a defendant, if sufficiently egregious, can constitute both negligence and willful and wanton conduct.” Therefore, “one can plead the same facts in two counts, one characterizing them as negligence and the other as willful and wanton conduct, if the same facts could support both theories.
The plaintiff had pled enough facts that the court found relevant and substantial to continue with the negligence and willful and wanton claim.
So Now What?
The actual rules, regulations, procedures were not identified by the court in making its decision. However, the continuous restatement of the plaintiff’s allegations in the same order and words. However, the court specifically stated the defendants failed to follow their own rules.
If you have rules, regulations, policies, procedures, or you must abide by such you MUST follow them. There are no loop holes, exceptions or “just this one time” when dealing with rules, policies and procedures that affect safety or affect minors. If you make them, you must follow them.
If you make them, you must make sure everyone is trained on them. One of the big issues the plaintiff pleads and the court accepted was the rules made by the parent organization were not known or followed by the subsidiary organization. The parent organization when making rules is under a requirement to make sure
the rules are understood and followed according to this decision in Tennessee.
The other major issue was transporting the plaintiff away from the location where the parents thought the plaintiff would be without their permission and then transporting the plaintiff on a road without meeting the requirements of state law, seats, seat belts, etc.
When you have minors, especially minors under the age of ten, you are only acting within the realm and space permitted by the parents. The line that makes me cringe every time I hear it on the news is “If I would have known they were going to do ______________, I never would have let me kid go.” Listen and you
will realize you will hear it a lot when a minor is injured.
You need to prepare your program and your parents so that line is never spoken about you.
If you are interested in having me write your release, fill out this Information Form and Contract and send it to me.
What do you think? Leave a comment.
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Author: Outdoor Recreation Insurance, Risk Management and Law
Copyright 2017 Recreation Law (720) Edit Law
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By Recreation Law Rec-law@recreation-law.com James H. Moss
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cognizable, exclusive control, wanton, medical expenses, supervision, pulled,
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Filed under: Case Analysis, Illinois, Minors, Youth, Children, Standards, Youth Camps Tagged: ACA, American Camping Association, Boy Scouts of America, Boys & Girls Clubs, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Child Care, Child Care Facility, cognizable, conscious disregard, exclusive control, factual allegations, farm, GSS, Guide to Safe Scouting, Guidelines, indifference, legal conclusions, Licensed Child Care, Licensed Child Care Facility, medical expenses, National Organization, negligence claims, Negligence per se, Notice, owed, pleaded, Policies, public highway, public road, pulled, pulling, Reckless, Regulations, res ipsa loquitur, right to relief, Rules, seat, speculative, Standards, supervise, Supervision, trailer, Transport, Wanton, wanton misconduct, willful
