MG+M Boston Attorneys Kevin Hadfield and Christos Koutrobis successfully obtained judgment on the pleadings for its client in Shepard v. AG Realty Investment, LLC, WWM-CV18-6014773-S, a personal injury case brought in the Connecticut Superior Court for the Judicial District of Putnam.
Plaintiff, a police officer, was attacked and bitten by a dog while executing a search warrant at an apartment building owned by MG+M’s client. In his complaint, Plaintiff stated that the dog was owned by a friend of the landowner’s tenant. Plaintiff claimed that the landowner should nevertheless be held liable because he was aware of, but did nothing to quell, significant alleged criminal activity on the premises. The alleged criminal activity resulted in Plaintiff’s need to be present on the property in his official capacity as well as the subsequent dog bite. Plaintiff asserted premises liability negligence claims in his complaint.
MG+M moved to strike the Plaintiff’s complaint for failure to state a claim. As grounds for its motion, MG+M argued that pursuant to the common law “firefighter’s rule,” a landowner owes no duty of care to a first responder that enters the premises within the scope of his official duties. In fact, the Connecticut Supreme Court has made clear that “under the firefighter’s rule, the landowner generally owes the firefighter or police officer injured on his property only the duty not to injure him willfully or wantonly . . . .” Levandovski v. Cone, 267 Conn. 653, 654 (2004) (internal citations and quotations omitted).
Plaintiff opposed MG+M’s motion, asserting that the claims were based on principles of “ordinary” negligence, rather than premises negligence, and were therefore excluded from the protections afforded by the firefighter’s rule. Plaintiff attempted to draw parallels between his case and Sepega v. DeLaura, 326 Conn. 788 (2017), in which the Connecticut Supreme Court permitted a case sounding in ordinary negligence to proceed against a landowner that actively barricaded himself into a house, forcing the officer to break the door down, resulting in injuries. The Superior Court rejected Plaintiff’s comparison, and held that the Sepega Defendant’s “active” negligence created an immediate hazard for the Plaintiff who had already entered the premises, which was distinguishable from the “passive” defective premises negligence allegations set forth in Plaintiff’s complaint.
In its memorandum of decision granting MG+M’s motion, the Court highlighted Plaintiff’s failure to allege that AG Realty had any knowledge of the presence of the dog that allegedly attacked the Plaintiff and also failed to assert factual allegations that would suggest willful or wanton misconduct on the part of the defendant. The Court struck plaintiff’s complaint and entered judgment on the stricken complaint in MG+M’s favor.
This common-sense application of the “firefighter’s rule” affirms the protections afforded to landowners from lawsuits by first responders, who may enter their premises at any time, from any direction, without invitation or warning, and without prior notice and opportunity to the landowner to remedy potential defects on the property. The rule prevents landowners from being held to an unreasonable standard of care, in that they would otherwise be compelled to keep all parts of their property in a condition uncalled for relative to the normal use for which the premises are utilized.