PREMISES LIABILTY: NEGLIGENT SECURITY
Ericson v. Federal Express Corporation (2008) 162 Cal.App.4th 1291, 77 Cal.Rptr.3d 1
An independent contractor who was working late at night at a FedEx terminal was severely injured when he was assaulted in a dimly lit parking lot while returning to his car at the end of his shift. The man sued FedEx for premises liability, alleging that the assault was reasonably foreseeable because the defendant required him to park in an isolated area, and did not include the non-employee parking area in its security inspections. The plaintiff also alleged that the defendant had notice of transients living in nearby canyons and that it should have allowed contractor’s employees to park where its own employees parked.
The defendant moved for summary judgment, arguing that it owed no duty to prevent the assault because there were no prior assaults on the property. The trial court granted the motion and the court of appeal affirmed, holding that the security measures proposed by the plaintiff were minimally burdensome, but that the third-party assault was not foreseeable under the “regular reasonable foreseeabilty” test:
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