Court Opinion

ID: 9669492
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 02:57:22.161592+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:57.257680
License: Public Domain

Michael J. Kelly, J.
(dissenting). I think this case is so far different on its facts from Allstate v Freeman, 432 Mich 656; 443 NW2d 734 (1989), that it presents a jury question. I therefore respectfully dissent.
Applying the majority’s logic by analogy, the raucous New Year’s Eve celebrant who fires into the air in a neighborhood forfeits his homeowner’s coverage. That stretches Allstate v Freeman too far. The shooter in the Allstate case got into a shouting match with her neighbor, went back into her home to get a .38 caliber handgun, returned to her front porch, and, without any warning, aimed the gun at the victim and fired. She stood between three and six feet away, and the bullet smashed the shoulder of the victim. I have no difficulty at all in deciding that that constitutes an expected or intended injury as a matter of law, notwithstanding Justice Levin’s dissent that there was a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether the shooter acted intentionally or criminally.
In this case, the shooter not only did not aim or point his gun at the victim, he did not even know that the victim was out in the yard. The victim was not three to six feet away; the victim was 150 feet away at a picnic table in the backyard. The unrebutted testimony is that the shooter was aiming at a vehicle in the driveway. To find that plaintiff’s injury was expected or intended stretches the principle of foreseeability over the *678horizon and completely confounds the meaning of natural, expected, anticipated consequences beyond reason. The five opinions of the Supreme Court in Allstate supra, may be fractured beyond the reasonable practitioner’s powers of synthesis, but the Court hopefully will drop the other shoe when it decides Buczkowski v McKay No 2, 437 Mich 1035; 471 NW2d 558 (1991). One surmises it must decide whether to permit the bench and bar further encroachment of the jury’s proximate-cause preserve. Until the Court speaks in a more discernible tongue, I would say plaintiff, on these facts, has presented a jury question.
I would reverse.