Filed 9/22/21 Devries v. Renaissance Hotel Management Co. CA2/7

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IN THE COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

SECOND APPELLATE DISTRICT

DIVISION SEVEN

LAURIE DEVRIES et al.,

Plaintiffs and Appellants,

v.

RENAISSANCE HOTEL 

MANAGEMENT COMPANY, 

LLC et al., 

Defendants and 

Respondents.

 B298045 

 (Los Angeles County 

Super. Ct. No. BC552750)

APPEAL from a judgment of the Superior Court of 

Los Angeles County, Timothy Patrick Dillon, Judge. Affirmed. 

Law Offices of Alain V. Bonavida and Alain V. Bonavida for 

Plaintiffs and Appellants. 

Ford, Walker, Haggerty & Behar and Edye A. Hill for 

Defendants and Respondents. 

___________________
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Laurie Devries slipped on a wet surface at the entrance to 

the Renaissance LAX Hotel and broke her leg. She and her 

husband, Lee Devries, sued Renaissance Hotel Management 

Company, LLC, Sunstone Hotel Investors, Inc., Renaissance 

Hotel Operating Company and Sunstone LA Airport LLC 

(collectively Renaissance companies), entities that own or control 

the hotel, for negligence, premises liability and loss of 

consortium. A jury found in favor of the Renaissance companies, 

and judgment was entered in their favor.

On appeal the Devrieses contend the trial court committed 

prejudicial error in excluding from evidence a video of an 

unrelated accident at the hotel. We affirm.

FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

1. The Accident

On November 17, 2012, after a six-hour flight, the

Devrieses arrived at the Renaissance LAX Hotel with their son 

and daughter. After registering, they went to their room to 

change for dinner. Laurie Devries put on rubber-soled sandals

(flip-flops). The family walked across the street in the rain 

without umbrellas to a fast-food restaurant. 

Returning to the hotel, the Devrieses walked on wet 

sidewalks, across a wet street and through the wet valet area. As 

Laurie Devries approached the hotel, she encountered a sign in 

her path, stepped around it and walked into the hotel without 

crossing the floor mat at the entrance. As she crossed the 

threshold, she slipped on the polished marble tile surface inside 

the hotel’s front door, falling on her right leg. 

The injury was serious. Laurie Devries suffered a broken 

tibia and fibula, went into shock and was transported by

ambulance to a nearby hospital. Surgery was scheduled for 
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10 days after the accident (after the family’s planned seven-day

Disney cruise vacation). The surgeon inserted four screws and a 

rod through Laurie Devries’s right leg. As of the time of trial, she 

still had the rod and one screw in her leg. 

2. The Complaint

The Devrieses sued the Renaissance companies for 

negligence, premises liability and, as to Lee Devries, loss of 

consortium. The complaint alleged the Renaissance companies 

failed to cover a known dangerous condition (the wet, slippery 

marble floor) with a floor mat and failed to have proper signage 

warning of a wet floor.

3. The Security Camera Footage

The Renaissance companies provided video footage of 

Laurie Devries’s accident, originally captured by a security 

camera and copied onto a smartphone by Bryan Williams, the 

hotel’s loss prevention supervisor and manager on duty the night 

of the accident. The quality of the black-and-white video footage 

was poor; and the video could only be viewed in fast-forward 

speed, making it extremely difficult to determinate exactly what 

had occurred. In the video the Devrieses can be seen approaching

the lobby entrance’s open sliding-door. Lee Devries and the

couple’s daughter are walking in front of Laurie Devries and 

their son. As Laurie Devries approaches the entrance, she walks 

around a sign. (It is impossible to read the words on the sign.) 

Laurie Devries enters the lobby through the right side of the 

entrance; her son enters through the left. Laurie Devries falls,

and people rush toward her. 

The original footage from the hotel’s security camera, 

recorded at normal speed and with time and date stamps, was 
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not preserved. The video recorded by Williams was admitted into 

evidence at trial. 

4. The Motion in Limine

The Devrieses sought to introduce video footage of an 

accident that had occurred at the hotel on December 12, 2011, 

almost a year before Laurie Devries’s accident. As depicted in 

the contested video, a woman slipped and fell at a different 

entrance to the hotel as she walked through a different kind of 

door. The woman was in the company of two other women; all 

three were carrying packages. The packages blocked the 

camera’s view of the woman’s feet; so the video did not show what 

type of shoes she was wearing, whether she walked on the floor 

mat and whether there was water on the floor. The Devrieses

argued the video was relevant to establish the hotel’s prior notice 

of the dangerous condition of its slippery floors. They also 

intended to argue this better quality video demonstrated the 

Renaissance companies could have produced a better video of 

Laurie Devries’s accident.

The Renaissance companies moved in limine to exclude all 

evidence of unrelated personal injury incidents at the hotel, 

including the December 12, 2011 video. After reviewing the two

videos, the deposition testimony of the Devrieses’ expert witness,

Brad Avrit, and Williams’s deposition, the trial court granted the 

motion in limine, finding the December 2011 incident was not 

sufficiently similar to Laurie Devries’s accident to be admissible. 

The court orally explained its ruling: “So in this situation, 

as I have said before, I’ve watched the video numerous times, and 

it is a different, in the court’s view, situation. It’s a different 

doorway. It’s a different kind of door. It’s a closed door. It’s a 

mat inside the doorway covering the area that here it’s contended 
5

should have been—had some protective something on it, whether 

adhesive or a mat or something. . . . Here we have a case where 

there’s a specific area of the hotel that the plaintiff is focusing on. 

It’s a specific area. It’s not a general area. It’s a very specific 

three-tile area where the claim is being made that this was a 

slippery-when-wet-surface, and adequate precautions were not 

taken, which is different in kind than the other video of the other 

incident that the court watched. . . .” “So I say that there is little, 

if any, relevance to the other incident. Balanced against that, I 

see the potential for undue confusion, prejudice, and without any 

doubt, the consumption of an undue amount of time because once 

that other incident is introduced, then the court has to examine 

that entire situation and have in effect a case within a case to try 

to understand what happened in that situation and what was the 

cause of the incident . . . . Under Evidence Code section 352, I 

think the relevance is questionable, if at all, and I’m balancing 

that against the potential for confusion, undue consumption of 

time, and prejudice to the defendants from introducing something 

that is different from, and not related to, the incident that we’re 

having a trial about.” 

5. The Trial and Verdict

During the four-day jury trial the Devrieses presented 

evidence there was no caution sign at the entrance to the hotel 

where Laurie Devries slipped on wet marble tiles, only a valet 

information sign. Williams, in contrast, testified there was a sign 

warning of the dangerous wet condition. The jury found in favor 

of the Renaissance companies, concluding they had not been 

negligent.
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DISCUSSION

1. Governing Law and Standard of Review

 “Evidence of prior accidents is admissible to prove a 

defective condition, knowledge, or the cause of an accident, 

provided that the circumstances of the other accidents are similar 

and not too remote.” (Elsworth v. Beech Aircraft Corp. (1984) 

37 Cal.3d 540, 555; accord, Ault v. International Harvester Co. 

(1974) 13 Cal.3d 113, 121-122; see Salas v. Department of 

Transportation (2011) 198 Cal.App.4th 1058, 1072 [“[i]t is well

settled that before evidence of previous accidents may be 

admitted to prove the existence of a dangerous condition, it must 

first be shown that the conditions under which the alleged 

previous accidents occurred were the same or substantially 

similar to the one in question”].) “When evidence is offered to 

show only that defendant had notice of a dangerous condition, the 

requirement of similarity of circumstances is relaxed: ‘“all that is 

required . . . is that the previous injury should be such as to 

attract the defendant’s attention to the dangerous situation.”’”

(Hasson v. Ford Motor Co. (1982) 32 Cal.3d 388, 404.)

“The question of admissibility of other accidents is 

primarily one for the trial court and is confined to its sound 

discretion.” (Salas v. Department of Transportation, supra, 

198 Cal.App.4th at p. 1072.) Even if the other-accident evidence 

is sufficiently similar to be relevant and otherwise admissible,

however, the trial court has discretion to exclude the evidence “if 

its probative value is substantially outweighed by the probability 

that its admission will (a) necessitate undue consumption of time 

or (b) create substantial danger of undue prejudice, of confusing 

the issues, or of misleading the jury.” (Evid. Code, § 352.)
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“A trial court’s discretionary ruling under [Evidence Code 

section 352] “‘must not be disturbed on appeal except on a 

showing that the court exercised its discretion in an arbitrary, 

capricious or patently absurd manner that resulted in a manifest 

miscarriage of justice.”’” (People v. Williams (2008) 43 Cal.4th 

584, 634-635]; accord, People v. Mungia (2008) 44 Cal.4th 1101, 

1130 [rulings made under Evidence Code section 352 “are 

reviewed for an abuse of discretion”]; see Phillips v. Honeywell 

Internat. Inc. (2017) 9 Cal.App.5th 1061, 1081 [“[w]hen weighing 

probative value against the danger of prejudice, a trial court is 

deemed to have abused its discretion if its decision was arbitrary, 

capricious, or patently absurd and resulted in a manifest 

miscarriage of justice”]; see generally People v. Flores (2020) 

9 Cal.5th 371, 409 [the trial court’s evidentiary rulings are 

reviewed for abuse of discretion]; Pannu v. Land Rover North 

America, Inc. (2011) 191 Cal.App.4th 1298, 1317 [“[t]rial court 

rulings on the admissibility of evidence, whether in limine or 

during trial, are generally reviewed for abuse of discretion”].)

There is no abuse of discretion requiring reversal “‘“as long as 

there exists a reasonable or even fairly debatable justification,

under the law, for the action taken.”’” (People v. Moore (2011) 

51 Cal.4th 1104, 1120; accord, Gonzales v. Nork (1978) 20 Cal.3d 

500, 507; Cahill v. San Diego Gas & Electric Co. (2011) 

194 Cal.App.4th 939, 957.) 
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2. The Court Did Not Err in Finding the Incidents Were 

Not Substantially Similar and Excluding the December 

2011 Video Pursuant to Evidence Code Section 352

The trial court acted well within its discretion in 

determining the December 12, 2011 accident at the hotel was not 

sufficiently similar to Laurie Devries’s accident such that

evidence of that earlier incident should be admitted at trial as 

proof of the Renaissance companies’ notice of the allegedly 

dangerous condition responsible for Laurie Devries’s injuries. As 

the court explained, the two events occurred nearly a year apart 

and took place at different entrances to the hotel, where the 

doors, doorways and flooring were apparently different. 

At the very least, because the woman who fell in 2011 was 

carrying packages that blocked the surveillance camera’s view of 

her feet and shoes, it was not possible to easily assess the 

similarities between the two events. Admission of the 2011 video, 

therefore, would have led, as the trial court stated, to a “case 

within a case,” with the parties necessarily litigating the 

circumstances surrounding the earlier accident. The court’s 

finding under Evidence Code section 352 that these additional 

issues would require an undue consumption of time was certainly 

reasonable.

In addition to its alleged relevance regarding notice of a 

dangerous condition, the Devrieses argued the video of the earlier 

incident was relevant to show the Renaissance companies failed 

to produce the best evidence of Laurie Devries’s accident. The 

court’s ruling excluding the video, they insist, prevented them

from arguing the jury should draw an inference adverse to the 

Renaissance companies based on the poor quality of the copy of 

the surveillance camera footage made by Williams. 
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This additional argument also fails. The 2011 video was 

unnecessary for the Devrieses to make this point at trial, which 

they did through their cross-examination of Williams, who had no 

adequate explanation for his failure to preserve the surveillance 

camera video footage, and during their closing argument.

In argument to the jury, for example, the Devrieses’ counsel 

told the jury, “So the hotel had the ability and the power to 

produce better evidence because they owned the signs. So they 

provided weaker evidence. They provided a very strange video 

that’s dark and in fast-forward motion for some odd reason, and 

the video they produced was Mr. Williams’ iPhone video of the 

surveillance system video, not an exported copy with time and 

date stamp and at normal speed. . . . So you should distrust the 

evidence of Mr. Williams’ declaration.” Additionally, the court 

instructed the jury with CACI No. 203, which states, “You may 

consider the ability of each party to provide evidence. If a party 

provided weaker evidence when it could have provided stronger 

evidence, you may distrust the weaker evidence.”

Any minimal probative value from actually showing the 

jury a better quality video was plainly outweighed by the 

possibility of confusion and prejudice from playing footage of an 

entirely unrelated slip-and-fall accident, even putting aside the 

undue consumption of time that would likely have ensued from

the need for additional evidence to explain the dissimilarities in 

the two events. Excluding the video was not an abuse of 

discretion. 
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DISPOSITION

The judgment is affirmed. The Renaissance companies are 

to recover their costs on appeal.

PERLUSS, P. J.

We concur:

FEUER, J.

IBARRA, J.*

* Judge of the Santa Clara Superior Court, assigned by the 

Chief Justice pursuant to article VI, section 6 of the California 

Constitution.