Jacksonville Florida - Suzanne Bass,
Personal Injury Lawyer

Florida Times-Union, The (Jacksonville, FL)
 

Suing the party host: Was slaying foreseeable? The shooting victim's parents say the Mandarin host, then 18, was negligent.

PAUL PINKHAM
Published: March 15, 2006

After most homicides, the law focuses on determining the guilt or innocence of the accused.
But the man charged with fatally shooting Tavoris Deon Jones at a Mandarin house party in 2004 isn't scheduled for trial for two more weeks. This week, instead of murder charges, a Jacksonville jury is being asked to decide whether the party's 18-year-old host was at fault.
Jones' parents sued Roger Sears II for negligence under a Florida law that makes it illegal for someone to allow underage drinking and drug use at a residential gathering. Their attorney, Suzanne Bass, said the slaying was the culmination of a series of "deadly failures" that began when Sears' father left town for the New Year's weekend and continued with four nights of increasingly wild partying involving hard liquor, marijuana and dozens of teenagers.
"What happened was inevitable," Bass told the jury Tuesday.
Her clients, Matthew Jones and Alice West, left the courtroom sobbing when Bass described the home where their 19-year-old son was shot in the back. They are seeking damages from Sears' father's homeowners insurance policy.
Sears' lawyer said Bass is reaching. There's no way Sears could have known someone would shoot Jones as he left the party, said attorney Carl Schwait.
"There is no negligence," he said. "It was an unforeseen criminal act."
Despite the law holding adults legally responsible for the actions of underage drinkers, civil lawsuits like the Sears case are rare in Florida because of the difficulty proving liability, said Jacksonville attorney Jim Kowalski.
Indeed, Bass dropped Roger Sears Sr. from the lawsuit just before jury selection Monday because of the difficulty proving him liable for events at a party hosted by his adult son. Normally, the parents are sued in house party cases.
Kowalski, who has settled one underage drinking case against a Jacksonville bar and won a civil judgment in another, said he found about 20 such cases against bars statewide. Claims against homeowners or "social hosts" are rarer still, he said.
The Sears case is even more unusual because the so-called house party law is more often applied when a teenager leaves such a gathering drunk and harms someone in a wreck. Rarely is a fatal shooting involved, said Rick Karcher, professor of torts at Florida Coastal School of Law.

 
'OUT OF CONTROL'
For a few nights in January 2004, the Chestnut Lake Drive home of Roger Sears Sr., a music minister at a Jacksonville church, was a party pad.
It started on New Year's Eve as a gathering of a few friends hanging out and playing video games, Schwait said. Sears Sr. had gone to Atlanta for the weekend and forbidden his son from having any parties.
The next night some more friends came by, and a few more the night after that. By Jan. 3, the fourth night, the gathering had grown to 80 to 100 people, mostly teenagers from Mandarin High School, Bass said.
Worried about his dad's orders, Sears II locked the bedroom doors, confining the partiers to the kitchen and living room. He monitored the front door and charged admission, Schwait said, to dissuade people he didn't know from entering. And because he was posted there, Schwait said, he didn't know about the booze flowing in the kitchen or the marijuana being smoked near the back door.
Jones had moved to Jacksonville from Georgia in November 2003 to work with his dad. His brother Jermaine knew Sears from Mandarin High.
They weren't at the party long when trouble started. Witnesses said Jermaine Jones bumped into a girl, and they exchanged harsh words. Sears II shut off the music, turned up the lights and broke up the argument before it could escalate further.
He returned to his post at the front door, where he learned several partygoers were planning to fight Jermaine Jones. He told Jermaine to leave out the back door. Tavoris Jones followed his brother.
But the backyard was bordered by a lake and two privacy fences, essentially blocking their escape. Shots were fired and Tavoris Jones was hit in the back. He died at the scene. An autopsy showed he had no alcohol or drugs in his system.
Eleven days later, Troy DeWayne Solomon, 20, surrendered to police and was charged with second-degree murder. His trial is scheduled March 27, but the evidence against him is shaky, lawyers on both sides told the jury Tuesday.
"This place was such bedlam that a homicide took place, and they can't tell who did it," said Eric Block, Bass' co-counsel. "What better example is there of a party that was out of control?"

'FORESEEABLE CONSEQUENCES'
Most house party cases that are litigated involve drunken driving by teens.
A St. Johns County teenager settled such a case in 2002 with parents who hosted a party of mostly Bolles School students in Palm Coast. The teen, John Ragsdale III, was left legally blind after the vehicle he was riding in, driven by the minor son of the party's hosts, crashed into a sign.
Ragsdale's lawsuit says the boy's mother, Janet Kindregan, violated Florida law by knowingly allowing the teenagers to drink in her home. Terms of the settlement were confidential, and Ragsdale's attorney, Christopher Hazelip, said he couldn't discuss specifics of the case.
But Hazelip said many parents are unaware they can be sued for negligence if they allow teenagers to drink in their homes, particularly as prom and graduation seasons approach.
"Some parents think they're doing their kids a service by allowing them to drink at their house, and they don't see the obvious thing -- that it's illegal to allow them to drink," he said.
And Kowalski said liability certainly isn't limited to drunken driving crashes.
"There's a line of cases that say once you put kids and alcohol together, the zone of foreseeable consequences includes almost everything you can think of," he said. A fatal shooting would fall within that zone, he said.
Karcher, the Florida Coastal professor, agreed that those who serve alcohol to minors are liable for just about anything that happens as a result, but he said the fact that the Sears party resulted in a shooting makes proving negligence to a jury more difficult for Bass and Block because it was such an unusual event.
"They're banking on being able to show that it's foreseeable that somebody's going to get shot," he said.
In the end, the case will come down to foreseeability -- whether the shooting was the inevitable result of an out-of-control teen party or an unpredictable random act of violence.
The trial is expected to last the rest of the week.
paul.pinkham@jacksonville.com,
(904) 359-4107