Court Opinion

ID: 9809432
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 21:13:15.630976+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:25:44.997964
License: Public Domain

Schenck, J.,
dissenting: This is an action by a consumer to recover of a bottler damages resulting from drinking bottled beverage containing noxious substance. The only exceptions set out in the appellant’s brief are those to the denial by the court of the defendant’s motion for judgment as in case of nonsuit, made when plaintiff had introduced his evidence and rested his case, and renewed after the evidence on both sides was in. C. S., 567.
There was plenary evidence that the plaintiff purchased a bottle of Coca-Cola which had been bottled and placed on the market by the defendant, and was made sick when he drank it, and subsequently discovered decomposed animal matter in the bottle.
To establish the actionable negligence of the defendant by showing “that like products manufactured under substantially similar conditions and sold by the defendant ‘at about the same time’ contained foreign *224or deleterious substances” (Enloe v. Bottling Co., 208 N. C., 305), tbe plaintiff relied upon tbe testimony of one B. M. Barker.
Tbe witness Barker testified: “Some few days or witbin a week after the occurrence of Mr. Tickle (the plaintiff) I examined another bottle of Coca-Cola purchased from the Burlington Coca-Cola people (the defendant). ... It was a greasy substance in the lower corner of the bottle. It was in the inside because you could taste and rub on the outside and you would not move it. I didn’t open that bottle of Coca-Cola . . . and bad it set up. . . . Tbe Coca-Cola wagon of the Burlington Coca-Cola Company gave me another in place of it.” On cross-examination the witness testified further: “I said yesterday it looked like a greasy substance. There was no other color about it except the greasy proposition. I did not shake the bottle. I turned it back to the driver of the wagon.”
I am of the opinion that this testimony is more than a scintilla of evidence of another instance of foreign matter in a beverage bottled by the defendant “at about the same time,” and under similar circumstances, as the beverage purchased and drank by the plaintiff was bottled. Such being the state of the evidence, I think the case was properly submitted to the jury. Broadway v. Grimes, 204 N. C., 623; Corum v. Tobacco Co., 205 N. C., 213; Enloe v. Bottling Co., supra, and cases there cited; Blackwell v. Bottling Co., 211 N. C., 729.
Clarkson and Seawell, JJ., concur in dissent.