Court Opinion

ID: 9589633
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:47:01.714605+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:37.918167
License: Public Domain

Blackburn, Judge.
On September 5, 1992, Carolyn Delores Harmon (decedent) drowned and was survived by her children, Reginald Bryan and Antonio Deon Harmon. Mattie Harmon, as administratrix applicant of the decedent’s estate and as guardian and next friend of the children, appellants/plaintiffs, commenced the underlying wrongful death action against the City of College Park (City) and Paul and Marlene T. Pichón. The appellees denied the material allegations of the complaint and moved for summary judgment. The trial court entered an order granting partial summary judgment on the motions because the decedent “assumed the risk of drowning, failed to exercise ordinary care for her own safety, and was, by her conduct the proximate cause of her own drowning.”
The evidence indicates that it had been raining heavily in the College Park area throughout the day and evening of September 4, 1992. Rainfall had been so heavy that the creek1 which separated the Villa Nieves Apartments from the tenant parking lot on Harvard Avenue had overflowed its banks and flooded adjacent areas. By midnight, flood waters had reached the handrail level on the concrete footbridge connecting the apartments to the parking lot.
At about midnight, the decedent decided to go to Nathaniel and Nettie Robinson’s apartment. She traversed the concrete footbridge which brought her to the front side of the apartment building at the end of the building directly abutting the creek. A straight, rear sidewalk ran parallel to the length of the apartment building, getting progressively closer to the creek before terminating on Harvard Avenue immediately to the left of the drainage culverts which ran under it. These culverts were a short, straight-line distance downstream from the footbridge and visible from it.
At the decedent’s request, Dennis Williams, another tenant of the apartments assisted the decedent as she crossed the footbridge by holding her arm. The water was up to the decedent’s waist as she crossed the bridge. Nathaniel Robinson watched the two from his apartment as they came across and heard them observe that they needed to exercise care as the water was high and moving quickly.
After arriving at the Robinsons’ apartment, the decedent declined the Robinsons’ offer to stay with them until it was over and expressed a desire to go to Melvin Blalock’s apartment, immediately saying to Blalock, “Come on. I got to go do my hair.” The decedent was in the apartment ten to fifteen minutes but never sat down, ig*137noring Blalock’s admonition to “chill out . . . it’s kind of bad out there.”
The decedent departed the Robinsons’ apartment by the back door because of the difficulty she had experienced on the footbridge. Nettie Robinson deposed that “[the decedent] walked right into [the waters],” evidencing that she knew the rear sidewalk was there. With Blalock behind her, she led the way down the sidewalk towards Harvard Avenue, beyond which was Blalock’s apartment. The decedent and Blalock moved hurriedly in water up to their waists. Neither used the chain link fence along the left side of the sidewalk to stabilize themselves. When they got beyond the end of the apartment building, light was sufficient for them to see the apartments across the street and the rapidly moving water in the vicinity of the drainage culverts. Waist-high waters, however, prevented them from observing the creek bed to the right of the sidewalk or other ground features.
As they neared Harvard Avenue, Blalock saw the decedent appear to veer to the right towards a whirlpool where the creek bed converged with three 48-inch drainage culverts running under Harvard Avenue. The decedent got caught in the whirlpool and disappeared under the water’s surface. Her body was never recovered.
Appellants contend that the trial court erred in granting the motions for summary judgment. In particular, they argue that the evidence of record establishes jury questions as to decedent’s status as a licensee, whether she exercised ordinary care for her own safety, whether she assumed the risk that resulted in her death, and whether her alleged failure to exercise ordinary care for her own safety proximately caused said death.
“We recognize the long-standing rule that issues of negligence and lack of ordinary care for one’s own safety are rarely appropriate matters for summary adjudication. Nonetheless, in certain instances, such as this, the trial court can conclude as a matter of law that plain, palpable and undisputed evidence establishes that plaintiff assumed the risk2 of her [death]. [Cit.]” Hackel v. Bartell, 207 Ga. App. 563, 564 (428 SE2d 584) (1993). “The danger of drowning in water is a palpable and manifest peril, the knowledge of which is chargeable to the decedent ... in the absence of a showing of want of ordinary capacity.” Bourn v. Herring, 225 Ga. 67, 69 (166 SE2d 89) (1969).
The trial court’s order states “[a] large body of rapidly moving *138water constitutes a clear and obvious dangerous condition. The dangers of walking through waist high water, which is rapidly moving near or into a drainage ditch, all without the benefit of being able to see ground features, when such action is undertaken by an individual suffering no deficiencies in capacity, all combine to present a clear and obvious case, as a matter of law, of an individual not exercising ordinary care for her own safety.” Moreover, the decedent was a person who could not have been other than thoroughly familiar with the area. She had used the footbridge before and at night, having visited the Robinsons at least ten times and Blalock “every three days” for two years while he was a tenant in the apartment complex. Neither would she have stepped unhesitatingly into the waters behind the Robinsons’ apartment had she not been familiar with the sidewalk running behind the building which was underwater and out-of-sight.
Immediately after the accident occurred, another resident of the apartments used the sidewalk to inspect the drowning scene. He deposed that he held on to the fence for the length of the sidewalk out of caution because “you can look over and see how fast the water is going. I’m not going in there if I can help it.” Nothing in the record suggests that the decedent should have been any less aware of the danger and concerned for her safety.
Pretermitting the decedent’s claims of negligence and nuisance as to the City and negligence as to the Pichons, where an intervening act is established as the proximate cause of injury or death, a valid defense arises in the defendant as a matter of law. Bartel, supra at 564. Accordingly, we find that the trial court properly granted the motions for summary judgment.

Judgment affirmed.

Beasley, C. J., Birdsong, P. J., Pope, P. J., Andrews, Johnson, Smith and Ruffin, JJ., concur. McMurray, P. J., dissents.

 The City’s water drainage system consists of naturally occurring and manmade features. The creek here involved is a naturally occurring component of such system.

 “ ‘[T]he doctrine of the assumption of the risk of danger applies only where the plaintiff, with a full appreciation of the danger involved and without restriction from his freedom of choice either by the circumstances or by coercion, deliberately chooses an obviously perilous course of conduct so that it can be said as a matter of law he has assumed all risk of injury.’ (Citations, punctuation and emphasis omitted.) Moore v. Svc. Merchandise Co., 200 Ga. App. 463, 464 (408 SE2d 480) (1991).” Union Camp Corp. v. Dukes, 217 Ga. App. 95, 97 (456 SE2d 645) (1995).