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Luisi v. Foodmaster Supermarkets12/14/2000
ing that they had witnessed fist fights between customers in the store, the beating of the store manager by a mentally ill person, and a threat to one of the Foodmaster cashiers when the cashier refused to cash a check. As additional materials in opposition to the defendants' motions, the plaintiff also submitted a number of newspaper clippings and police reports relating to armed robberies, property crimes, and assaults which had occurred in the parking lot of the mall and in the vicinity of the mall. While the previous occurrence of criminal acts on or near the defendants' premises is a circumstance to consider, it is not necessarily determinative of the outcome in this case.
As the Supreme Judicial Court, in Whittaker v. Saraceno, 418 Mass. 196, 200 (1994), pointed out, criminal conduct in our daily life is omnipresent and, thus, even a violent attack is foreseeable. Nevertheless, we have not placed the "burden of all harm caused by random violent criminal conduct on the owner of the property where the harmful act occurred, without proof that the landowner knew or had reason to know of a threat to the safety of persons lawfully on the premises against which the landowner could have taken reasonable preventive steps." Ibid. See Carey v. New Yorker of Worcester, Inc., 355 Mass. at 452 (bar owner held liable for injuries inflicted upon a patron who without warning was shot by another customer whom the bar owner's employees knew to be drunk and a troublemaker but whom they nevertheless took no steps to remove from the premises or any other preventive measures); Sharpe v. Peter Pan Bus Lines, Inc., 401 Mass. 788, 792-794 (1988) (common carrier held liable for wrongful death of passenger who without warning or provocation was stabbed repeatedly by another person, where there was evidence that the bus terminal was in a high crime area and had been the scene of a number of personal injury crimes, and where the presence of an uniformed security guard would have acted as a deterrent to this crime); Flood v. Southland Corp., 416 Mass. at 72-73 (where store employee knew that teenagers gathered outside the store were "high" and one of them had a knife, but no particular security precautions were taken, the store was potentially liable in negligence for injuries inflicted upon one of the teenagers when stabbed by the teenager with a knife); Fund v. Hotel Lenox of Boston, Inc., 418 Mass. 191, l93-195 (1994) (where hotel was in a high crime area and was aware of numerous crimes within the hotel and at nearby hotels but failed to take certain measures to protect its guests from criminal acts of third persons, the risk of a violent attack upon one of its guests was within the foreseeable risk of harm resulting from that failure); Whittaker v. Saraceno, 418 Mass. at 200 (where a commercial landlord had no knowledge of any attacks on tenants in the common area of its office building, the landlord had no reason to know of any threat to the safety of its tenants that required the landlord to take preventive steps to protect its tenants); Griffiths v. Campbell, 425 Mass. 31, 35 (1997) (a residential landlord was not liable for the wrongful death of a Boston police officer who was murdered in a drug raid on one of the apartments leased by the landlord to a tenant where the homicide was not within the foreseeable risk of harm based simply on the plaintiff's assertion that the landlord should have suspected drug activity within that apartment).
The issue presented by the circumstances in this case is simply whether the presence of a security guard, uniformed or otherwise, would have prevented the sudden, unprovoked attack that resulted in the plaintiff's injuries. The plaintiff argues that it would have because, once the B
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