Court Opinion

ID: 9641178
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:24:44.605911+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:35.641770
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN N. LIMBAUGH, JR., Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
At the outset, I note the sad irony that the party to this action who is most subject to emotional distress — the father who lost his child — is the party being sued for having caused emotional distress to a stranger who merely saw the child. This, it seems to me, is the unfortunate result of the majority’s misreading and misapplication of Bass v. Nooney Co., 646 S.W.2d 765 (Mo. banc 1983), and Asaro v. Cardinal Glennon Memorial Hospital, 799 S.W.2d 595 (Mo. banc 1990).
Bass, relying on the Restatement (Second) of ToRts sec. 313(l)(a), holds that
a plaintiff will be permitted to recover for emotional distress provided: (1) the defendant should have realized that his conduct involved an unreasonable risk of causing the distress; and (2) the emotional distress or mental injury must be medically diagnosable and must be of sufficient severity so as to be medically significant.
Bass, 646 S.W.2d at 772-73. Asaro later recognized, however, relying in turn on the Restatement (Second) of ToRts see. 313(2), that the Bass rule “[has] no application to illness or bodily harm of another which is caused by emotional distress arising solely from harm or peril to a third person, unless the negligence of the actor has otherwise created an unreasonable risk of bodily harm to the other.” Asaro, 799 S.W.2d at 597. Asaro then fashioned a different rule — the “zone of danger” rule — holding without qualification that “a plaintiff may recover for emotional distress resulting from observing physical injury to a third person only if the plaintiff is within the zone of danger.” Id. at 596. Specifically, the plaintiff must prove (1) that the defendant should have realized that his conduct involved an unreasonable risk to the plaintiff, (2) that plaintiff was present at the scene of an injury producing, sudden event, (3) and that plaintiff was in the zone of danger, placed in a reasonable fear of physical injury to his or her own person. Id. at 600.
Under the more stringent zone of danger test, plaintiff here could not recover because he was not in a zone of danger, that is, he was not placed in a reasonable fear of physical injury to his own person when he viewed the dead child subsequent to the accident. The majority does not contend otherwise. Instead, the majority holds that plaintiff was a “direct victim” of defendant’s negligence under the Bass test, rather than a “bystander” (indirect victim?) under Asaro’s zone of danger test. A “direct victim,” according to the majority, is a plaintiff “directly involved in the accident, whose emotional distress is either caused by fear for [his] or her own safety or caused by the suffering of another.” As I understand this position, plaintiff was a “direct victim” because his injury — his emotional distress in viewing the body of the dead child — was incurred as part and parcel of the accident that caused the death of the child; in other words, both the accident- itself and the plaintiffs subsequent viewing of the body were just a single event. The point is that the majority can classify plaintiff as a “direct victim” and avoid the zone of danger test only by *451characterizing the sequence of events as a single event. And only then can plaintiffs injuries be said to emanate directly from the accident rather than the subsequent viewing.
And that gives rise to my initial disagreement: The evidence does not support the single event characterization, and in fact, there was a significant temporal disparity between the accident itself, the subsequent viewing of the body, and the onset of the distress to plaintiff. Under the majority’s description of the scene, a collision occurred, and immediately thereafter plaintiff “talked to a man who ran up to his truck to see if he was injured.” Plaintiff “told the man he was all right and to check the other vehicle,” and then plaintiff, himself, “jumped out of his truck and ran to [defendant’s] car to check on the occupants.” It was at that time he first saw the body of the child, which led to his emotional distress. Plaintiff now concedes that he did not suffer emotional distress from the accident itself, but that the sole cause of his emotional distress was the viewing of the child’s body after the accident. The facts, then, are clear that although plaintiff had been a participant in the accident, he was not injured in it, and by the time he observed the body, the accident was over. And at that point, plaintiff was no longer involved in the accident, but was a bystander attempting to help the victims of the accident.
Although the majority “recognizes the view that a plaintiff may suffer some emotional distress as a direct victim and some emotional distress as a bystander,” which accommodates the kind of temporal distinction at play in this case, it rejects that view in favor of the notion that a plaintiff’s emotional distress caused by the accident itself is “generally inseparable” from the emotional distress caused by observing a third-party’s injuries. But that determination, of course, flies in the face of plaintiff’s admission that he suffered no emotional distress from the accident, but only from the subsequent viewing of the body. Inexplicably, the majority finds that “[t]hese admissions demonstrate that the grief and distress [plaintiff] experienced were a result of his participation in the accident that killed [the child], and not simply from viewing her body.” I am simply at a loss to understand how plaintiff’s emotional distress was inseparable from the accident when the plaintiff, himself, maintained that his distress was separable.
This extended attempt to sort out the majority’s maneuverings belies my greater concern about the case, which is that under Asaro, the Court has no legitimate reason to distinguish between liability to a “direct victim” and liability to a “bystander.” That distinction, which according to the majority turns on “whether the plaintiff was directly involved in the accident,” has no basis in Bass or Asaro. Although the majority states that Asaro “expanded liability for emotional distress by recognizing a new cause of action for bystander plaintiffs,” Asaro did no such thing. Asa-ro is instead a limitation on Bass because it applies in all cases in which plaintiff’s emotional distress resulted solely from observing injury to a third party, whether or not the observation occurred at the time the negligent act was committed (the collision in this case) or at any time thereafter (the observance of the injury after the collision). The holding of Asaro is unequivocal and unqualified: “[A] plaintiff may recover for emotional distress resulting from observing physical injury to a third person only if the plaintiff is within the zone of danger.” Asaro, 799 S.W.2d at 596. In short, Asaro precludes the kind of “direct victim” recovery the majority now approves.
*452Finally, I suggest that the majority has overlooked that its “direct victim” expansion of the cause of action for negligent infliction of emotional distress will cause wildly incongruous, if not absurd results. Take, for example, the situation in Asaro itself. Plaintiff Asaro was the mother of a five-year-old child who underwent heart surgery that was so botched that the child’s pre-operative symptoms of pain and fainting spells persisted, requiring a second surgery to accomplish what was intended by the first surgery. As a result of the doctors’ negligence, the mother claimed that she, herself, “underwent severe, medically diagnosable and significant emotional distress and depression.” Id. at 597. This Court held, however,
[wjhile [mother] was intimately involved with her son’s treatment and understandably distressed at the condition of his health, she was not the patient. She faced no personal peril. Her understandable distress follows solely from seeing the harm and suffering endured by her young son. Her petition states no facts, nor permits such inferences as might bring her averments within the zone of danger standard we adopt today.
Id. at 600. Neither the mother who observed her suffering child in Asaro nor the stranger who observed the dead child in this case were in a zone of danger, but the stranger recovers, and the mother does not. In these situations, one would think the law should favor the mother of a child before a stranger to a child, or at least that the law should apply the same to both.
For the foregoing reasons, I would affirm the judgment of the trial court dismissing plaintiffs claim.