Court reluctant to expand firearm owner’s liability

When Catryn Bridges started dating 52-year-old Bernie Parrish, she didn’t know he had a history of escalating violence towards the women he’d dated, or that he’d been charged by those girlfriends with kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon. During their rocky relationship, Bernie’s behavior escalated until March 2011, when he drove to the veterinary office where Bridges worked and shot her in the stomach.

She survived, but Parrish killed himself later that day with the same gun.

Parrish, a felon barred from owning guns, lived on property owned by his parents, Harvey and Barbara. They owned several guns that they left unsecured and to which they let Bernie have access, including the one used to shoot Bridges. She sued the Parrishes, alleging that given his history they were negligent in failing to keep Bernie from using their guns.

A divided North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled last year that the case should be dismissed, and on appeal June 13, the state’s Supreme Court agreed, holding that Bernie’s criminal conduct was an unanticipated event that absolved his parents of liability. The case largely hinged on how far-reaching of a precedent the court thought it might set by finding the parents liable for their son’s actions.

The court held that Bridges could not sue the Parrishes unless her injury was a foreseeable one that could have been avoided by their proper care. Criminal acts by a third person, even a relative, are generally considered unforeseeable, and thus the law rarely requires people to try to prevent other peoples’ criminal acts unless they have a special relationship with the victim of the crime.

Although the Parrishes had met Bridges and knew she was dating their son, the court found that Bridges had not presented any evidence that they had a special relationship as defined by law, so the only way they could be sued for negligence was if they owed a duty to the public to try to prevent Bernie from accessing their guns. The court said that this would essentially require the judicial branch to create a legal requirement for gun owners to store their guns securely, a decision that the court said was best left to the legislature.

“Holding gun owners responsible for the criminal use of their guns by unauthorized adult users would unfairly burden those who lawfully own and store guns in their homes,” Justice Mark Martin wrote for a unanimous court, noting that the legislature “enacted a myriad of statutes relating to the use and storage of firearms” but had declined to impose civil liability on gun owners for failing to lock them up.

The court also asserted that no state in the country had adopted a cause of action for the negligent storage of firearms that would be broad enough to cover Bridges’ claim. But John Korzen of Wake Forest University School of Law’s Appellate Advocacy Clinic, who represented Bridges, disagreed. He argues that multiple cases in other states had found a duty to store a gun away from a dangerous family member, and that the court expressed a concern that mere possession would lead to automatic liability, which he said was not his argument.

“The court said that virtually anyone who had a gun stolen from them could be liable [under Bridges’ theory], but I would disagree,” Korzen said. “This wasn’t a case involving theft by some stranger. This was a foreseeable issue and also a foreseeable victim, so I think the court could have avoided a slippery slope concern by looking at what’s been alleged in this case … The court was not required to decide whether every time there’s a stolen gun there’s automatically liability.”

Steve Epstein of Poyner Spruill in Charlotte, who represented the Parrishes, challenged that assertion. Epstein said a decision in favor of Bridges would have been far-reaching and could have left homeowners liable for any dangerous item in their house, not just guns.

“I think the court was very wary of opening up that Pandora’s box,” Epstein said. “It would have been very difficult for the court to draw a meaningful line that would have allowed liability to exist in this case, and not permitted liability to exist in a wide variety of similar fact scenarios.”

Epstein said his clients were deeply affected emotionally by the lawsuit, given that their son was killed with the same gun, and felt that it added insult to their injury. Bernie’s death was not mentioned in the record or at oral argument, and the justices were apparently unaware of it—Martin noted that Bridges had sued Harvey and Barbara “rather than suing Bernie.”

The eight-page decision is Bridges v. Parrish (Lawyers Weekly No. 13-06-0594). The full text of the opinion is available online at nclawyersweekly.com.

Follow David Donovan on Twitter @NCLWDonovan