Supreme Court: Innkeeper Liable For Guests' Injuries
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The owner and operator of a Holiday Inn Express in Roanoke, Virginia, claimed that it could not be liable for injuries sustained by a guest when that guest was robbed and injured in its parking lot. The guest was shot and his infant daughter, who was still in the family car, was abducted. The trial court had dismissed the case, finding that a Virginia hotel does not owe duty to a guest to protect it from violent third parties.
The Supreme Court reversed and found that there is a special relationship between an innkeeper and a guest that imposes a duty of "utmost care and diligence" to protect the guest against reasonably foreseeable injury from the criminal conduct of a third party.
Here, where the plaintiff alleged that the hotel was in a high crime area and indeed had reported numerous crimes and trespasses against its property to the police over a number of years, that hotel may be liable to a guest for failing to protect that guest from injury.
The guest alleged that over a three year period prior to his attack, the hotel employees had contacted the police 96 times to report criminal conduct involving robberies, malicious wounding, shootings, and other criminally assaulted acts. As a result of these repeated incidents, the hotel had been advised by policy that "its guests were at a specific eminent risk for harm to their persons from uninvited persons coming into or upon its property."
The case is Taboada v. Daly 7, Inc. and it was decided March 3, 2006.