Morton v. Park Christian School

Background

Jimmy Morton was a passenger in a pickup truck traveling to a Wisconsin Dells basketball tournament. The truck was driven by Zachary Kvalvog, who was traveling with Morton and two other passengers as part of a caravan involving vehicles driven by Park Christian basketball coach Joshua Lee and football coach Timothy Kerr. A semi-trailer truck moved into Zachary’s lane, Zachary lost control, and the pickup crashed. Zachary and another passenger died; Morton suffered serious injuries, including a traumatic brain injury.

Morton asserted negligence claims against Park Christian, Lee, Kerr, and Christopher Nellermoe; negligence-per-se claims against Lee and Kerr based on alleged traffic violations; claims against Park Christian based on vicarious liability and negligent supervision; and a breach-of-fiduciary-duty claim against Park Christian. The court applied Minnesota law and relied substantially on the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision in Fenrich v. The Blake School, which held that a school’s assumption of supervision and control over an athletic trip can create a jury question about its duty and the foreseeability of harm.

Expert-testimony motions

The court addressed motions to exclude testimony from Morton’s liability experts, Steven R. Arndt and Thomas N. Rush, under Federal Rule of Evidence 702, which governs whether expert testimony is sufficiently reliable and helpful to the jury.

The court granted in part and denied in part the motion concerning Arndt. It excluded Arndt’s opinion that Park Christian was the “controlling entity” because that conclusion was a factual inference rather than the product of a reliable specialized method. It also excluded his opinion that the crash would have been prevented if Park Christian had followed its transportation policies, because that conclusion was speculative and could confuse the jury. The court allowed testimony about transportation policies and related information when it fit the facts of this case, including information about inexperienced teenage drivers’ ability to respond to hazards. It excluded Arndt’s opinion that commercial transportation or adult-driven vehicles would have been safer because that issue was not helpful to deciding the legal questions presented.

The court also granted in part and denied in part the motion concerning Rush. It rejected the defendants’ request to exclude all of Rush’s accident-reconstruction opinions as speculative, explaining that his use of ranges of possible facts did not make his opinions inadmissible and that attacks on the factual basis of his opinions could be addressed through cross-examination. The court nevertheless excluded portions of Rush’s opinions suggesting that Zachary accelerated to keep up with the caravan because those statements went beyond Rush’s accident-reconstruction expertise and attributed a possible motive to Zachary. The court denied the defendants’ request for an order barring any undisclosed or supplemental opinions because they had not shown that Rush had actually offered such opinions.

Summary-judgment rulings

Summary judgment is appropriate only when no genuine dispute of an important fact exists and the moving party is entitled to judgment under the law. The court denied Park Christian’s and Lee’s motions as to Morton’s ordinary negligence claims. It concluded that a reasonable jury could find that Park Christian and Lee assumed supervision and control over the tournament trip. The evidence included Lee’s organization of the summer basketball program, the tournament’s connection to Park Christian, Lee’s registration of the team as “Park Christian School,” school-business-office processing of the tournament payment, and Lee’s request for school transportation. The court also found trial-worthy questions about whether Zachary’s driving created an objectively reasonable expectation of danger and whether his response to the encroaching semi proximately caused the crash.

The court granted Kerr’s summary-judgment motion as to Morton’s negligence claims. It found no record evidence from which a reasonable jury could conclude that Kerr assumed supervision and control over the trip. The court distinguished Kerr’s role as a football coach, his status as a voluntary driver and parent on the trip, and his possible role as a substitute coach from the control that Lee exercised over the basketball event.

The court granted Lee’s and Kerr’s motions as to the negligence-per-se claims. Morton based those claims on alleged speed-limit violations. Under Minnesota law, violations of traffic regulations are not negligence per se; they may instead be evidence of negligence. The court granted Park Christian’s motion as to Morton’s breach-of-fiduciary-duty claim because Morton did not show that the school owed him a fiduciary duty. The court found that the student-or-recruit relationship described in the record was not a fiduciary relationship automatically recognized by Minnesota law, and the record did not support a special, fact-based fiduciary relationship.

The court denied Lee’s motion based on Minnesota’s nonprofit-service immunity statute. Although the statute generally protects uncompensated agents of qualifying tax-exempt organizations under specified conditions, it does not protect injuries personally and directly caused by the individual. The court found unresolved legal and factual questions about the meaning and application of that exception, so it left the issue for a later motion under Rule 50.

Morton’s motion and final order

The court denied Morton’s motion for partial summary judgment. It declined to treat a finding from an earlier state-court case—that the Wisconsin Dells trip was a school activity—as binding because that finding was not necessary to the earlier judgment. The court also found genuine factual disputes about whether Park Christian and Lee assumed supervision and control over the trip and whether Zachary’s driving created a foreseeable public danger.

The final order denied Nellermoe’s summary-judgment motion as moot because he had been dismissed by stipulation. It granted in part and denied in part the motions to exclude Arndt’s and Rush’s testimony. It granted Kerr’s summary-judgment motion; granted in part and denied in part Park Christian’s motion, granting it as to Count Six and otherwise denying it; granted in part and denied in part Lee’s motion, granting it as to Count Three and otherwise denying it; and denied Morton’s motion for partial summary judgment. Judge Eric C. Tostrud signed the order.