JOHNSON v. AVIS RENT a CAR SYSTEM, LLC (Two Cases)

Byron Perry, who washed cars at an Atlanta Avis rental lot, stole an SUV after hours and drove around for hours trying to sell it before police spotted him. He led them on a high-speed chase and crashed into Brianna Johnson and Adrienne Smith, badly injuring them. Both women sued Avis, the lot's operator CSYG, its owner, and a regional manager, arguing the companies were negligent for letting the car get stolen and for hiring Perry despite his criminal past. Juries awarded them millions of dollars, but the Court of Appeals of Georgia threw out both verdicts, ruling the companies could not be blamed as a matter of law. The Supreme Court of Georgia agreed. It held that even assuming the companies were careless in letting the SUV be stolen, Perry's decision to flee police at high speed hours later was not a reasonably foreseeable result of that carelessness, so his criminal conduct alone caused the crash. The court also held that Perry was not acting on the job when he hit Smith, so a separate claim that the operator negligently hired him also failed.

The court held that a defendant's negligence in allowing a vehicle to be stolen is not the proximate cause of injuries later caused by the thief's own criminal driving unless the defendant had reasonable grounds to anticipate that specific kind of harm, and that an employee is not acting 'under color of employment' merely because he wore a company shirt while committing an unrelated crime.

The ruling limits when Georgia rental car companies, employers, and property owners can be sued after a stolen vehicle or an off-duty employee causes an accident, making it harder for accident victims to recover damages from businesses whose security lapses set a crime in motion.

Affirmed

1. The court applied the legal rule of proximate cause, meaning the direct link the law requires between someone's carelessness and the harm that follows, which asks whether the harm was a probable, foreseeable result rather than merely a possible one.
2. It explained that when a third person's criminal act intervenes between a defendant's negligence and the injury, that criminal act becomes the legal cause of the harm unless the defendant had reasonable grounds to expect that specific kind of wrongdoing.
3. Applying this to the facts, the court found only one prior theft at the Courtland Street lot (a daytime theft with no chase) and just two other high-speed-chase thefts among hundreds of thousands of Avis vehicles nationwide, which was not enough to make Perry's late-night theft, hours-long search for a buyer, and subsequent police chase foreseeable.
4. The court rejected the argument that a missing-records instruction (allowing the jury to infer Avis hid evidence of more thefts) changed the outcome, reasoning that any inferred extra thefts would show only that Avis failed to stop thefts, not that it could foresee an employee stealing a car and later injuring bystanders during a chase.
5. On the separate negligent hiring claim against the lot's operator and owner, the court applied the rule that an employer can be liable for hiring a dangerous worker only if the harmful act happened during work hours or the employee was acting 'under color of employment,' meaning he used his job position to carry out the wrongdoing.
6. Because Perry did not interact with Smith as an Avis employee and only wore an Avis shirt to have an excuse if stopped by police, the court concluded he was not acting under color of employment when he crashed into her, even though it disagreed with part of the Court of Appeals' reasoning on that point.

• stolen rental car
• proximate cause
• negligent hiring
• police chase crash
• Avis Rent A Car