In personal injury law, one of the elements that must be proven in every case is that the defendant owed the plaintiff or victim a duty of due care to take reasonable steps to minimize the risk of harm. This relationship exists between all people. Typical examples are the duty owed by a motorist to other people on the road, a landowner to visitors or a hospital to a patient.
The family of a man who died in 2014 after falling from the roof of a parking garage is suing a nearby hotel for wrongful death. alleging that hotel employees threw the man out of the hotel for appearing to be intoxicated, but did not take steps to make sure he would be safe after leaving. The man ended up in a neighboring parking garage, where a hotel employee saw him sleeping around 3 a.m. The worker called a police non-emergency line, but reached a voice recording. Neither he nor anyone else called 911
Hours later, a hotel guest discovered the man’s body on a second-floor balcony. He had apparently fallen in the night. He was 23. The lawsuit argues that the hotel’s employees owed the deceased a duty when they discovered him unable to care for himself