Court Opinion

ID: 9853512
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:49:46.370698+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:50.563648
License: Public Domain

*688Judge Phillips
dissenting.
In my opinion the evidence presented at trial was sufficient to support the verdict and I vote to uphold the judgment entered on it. Accepting plaintiffs’ evidence as true and viewing it in the light most favorable to them it tends to show, in my judgment, that one of defendant’s agents was negligent and plaintiffs’ house was proximately damaged thereby. In effect, the defendant corporation was the custodian of plaintiffs’ house for the purpose of showing it to prospective purchasers; as such its agents had the duty to use due care to avoid damaging the house, either by their own conduct or by that of those who they took into the house. One who activates devices in a strange house, such as a bleed valve and breaker switch, or permits others to do so without knowing what such action might entail and without putting things back as they were, is clearly negligent; and the evidence tends to show, as the majority concedes, that these devices were activated while one of defendant’s agents was showing the house to a prospective purchaser. That the bleed valve and breaker switch were both opened while the house was in defendant’s custody is proof enough, in my view, that the agent involved either did it, knew about it, or should have known about it, and thus was negligent. To so hold is not tantamount to imposing strict liability duties on the defendant; it is but holding defendant accountable for what it knew or should have known in accord with basic principles of the law of negligence. Since who opened the devices should be known to defendant, but cannot be known by plaintiffs, instead of defendant’s professed ignorance and plaintiffs’ inability to prove just who opened them being a basis for dismissing the case, it is proof positive, I think, that defendant’s agent was either inattentive or untruthful. For nothing in the evidence warrants the assumption that the agent in charge of the house did not or should not have seen that the two devices were activated, as both were located where their use was not likely to be missed by a reasonably observant agent. The bleed valve was in an “access hole” in the hall, about waist high above the water heater, and the breaker switch was in a switch box, also on the second floor.
The old bromide about negligence not being presumed from the “mere fact of injury” has no application, as it so seldom does. The jury did not presume defendant corporation was negligent just because the injury occurred; it presumed it was negligent *689because of the meddlesome and thoughtless things that were done either by its agent or in his presence. That someone else may have entered the well house and took the last step necessary to cause the house to be flooded is immaterial; if the negligent acts in the house had not been committed, the house would not have been damaged.