Mall Owners Not Liable for Restaurant Manager’s Murder

A waiter at a restaurant in a New York mall fatally stabbed the restaurant’s manager as she was closing the restaurant for the night. The manager’s estate sued the mall owners, claiming that they didn’t take adequate security measures, especially in light of a prior incident a year earlier in which a man fired a semi-automatic assault weapon in the mall’s common area, wounding two people.

A New York appeals court recently ruled that the mall owners could not be held liable. The court said that although the owners had a duty to maintain the property for the safety of tenants, their employees, and customers, the owners had taken sufficient precautions to protect them from foreseeable harm. The incident in this case, said the court, didn’t relate to the prior incident and wasn’t foreseeable, and installing more video cameras or adding more security patrols in the common areas wouldn’t have prevented a crime that took place entirely within the tenant’s premises [Inger v. PCK Development, July 5, 2012].