Court Opinion

ID: 9777678
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 20:19:43.007001+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:32:59.171034
License: Public Domain

O’CONNOR, Justice,
concurring.
I agree that the judgment should be reversed, but for different reasons than the majority. Thus, I do not join the majority opinion.
In Chapman v. Oshman’s Sporting Goods, Inc., 792 S.W.2d 785, 787 (Tex.App. — Houston [14th Dist.] 1990, writ denied), the court held that once a defendant proved that a criminal act was the intervening and superseding cause of an injury, the burden then shifted to the plaintiff to present evidence raising an issue on foreseeability. Chapman is the only case I know that expressly makes the plaintiff prove the injury was foreseeable. To win a summary judgment, the defendant generally must prove the crime was not foreseeable. The Chapman plaintiffs lost because they did not prove the crime was foreseeable.
In Walker v. Harris, 924 S.W.2d 375, 377-78 (Tex.1996), the supreme court did not state, as the Chapman court did, that the burden shifted to the plaintiff to prove foreseeability, but it ruled as if that were the law. It affirmed a summary judgment in an apartment security case because the plaintiffs failed to prove the murder was foreseeable. The court examined the evidence of neighborhood crimes and found it was insufficient to make that murder foreseeable. Walker, 924 S.W.2d at 377-78. The Walker holding indicates that this summary judgment should be affirmed because appellant here proved less neighborhood crime than did the plaintiffs in Walker. The entire record on this subject is Jeromy Wiley’s deposition statement that police were dispatched once to some unidentified premises (not the Wileys’ house) on the Wileys’ street due to a burglary before July 20,1992 (the offense date) and that on a different occasion, a car was stolen from the Wileys’ driveway. Nothing shows when those events happened, and Jeromy testified that his house, the site of these murders, was never burglarized. Nothing shows that the Wileys knew or should have known before this crime occurred that the unidentified house on their street was burglarized at the unstated time. That is much less than the level of crime shown in Walker v. Hanis.
Despite this weak evidence, there is something unusual in this record that makes it inappropriate for summary judgment. The Wileys are defendants in this severed case, but, like appellants, they also sued Rex Mays’s wife, Rex Mays’s landlord, and the Inwood North Homeowners Association. In their pleadings, the Wileys claimed that *833Mays’s crime was foreseeable. That is the opposite of what they now claim. It raises a fact issue. For that reason, I concur in reversing the summary judgment.