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Weil v. Gaia6/29/1999
This is an interlocutory appeal in a personal injury case. The plaintiff passenger in an uninsured vehicle was injured by a gunshot from the driver of another uninsured vehicle. The injured plaintiff filed suit against the drivers of both vehicles and sought coverage under the uninsured motorist provision of her automobile insurance. The defendant insurance company filed a motion to sever the insurance coverage question from the tort action and deny coverage. This motion was denied by the trial court. The insurance company appeals. We reverse.
The facts of this case are undisputed. On May 4, 1996, Plaintiff/Appellee Jessica Weil ("Weil") rode to a friend's house in an uninsured car driven by Michael Ware ("Ware"). Ware brought his Rottweiler puppy along with him to the friend's house. The friend, who was not fond of dogs, asked that Ware put the puppy in her backyard. When Weil and Ware left the friend's house, they discovered that the puppy had escaped from the backyard. Ware left on foot to go search for the dog. He returned shortly with the puppy. Weil and Ware got in Ware's car to leave. Ware was driving and Weil was the passenger. As they were driving away, they heard someone screaming at them from another car. Weil later discovered that this person was Defendant John Gaia ("Gaia"). She had never met him, but knew who he was. As Weil and Ware drove off, Gaia chased them in his car. Gaia tried to run Weil and Ware off the road by ramming Ware's vehicle with his own car. At stoplights, Gaia continued to scream at Weil and Ware. Ware then entered the highway; Gaia followed. Once on the highway, Gaia pulled out a 9 mm pistol and shot into Ware's car. When Gaia fired into Ware's car, Gaia's car was traveling near the left rear panel of Ware's car. Weil was hit in the back and suffered permanent serious injuries. Weil's injury was caused only by the gunshot wound; she was not injured on the occasions when Gaia rammed Ware's car with his own. Neither Gaia nor the car he was driving were insured at the time of the accident.
Weil filed a lawsuit seeking damages for her personal injuries. Named as defendants were Michael Ware, John Gaia, and Joshua Cole, the owner of the vehicle driven by Gaia. Weil sought $1,500,000 million dollars in compensatory damages from each defendant.
At the time of the incident, Weil had automobile insurance with State Farm Insurance Company ("State Farm"). Weil's personal injury lawsuit against the above named defendants was served on State Farm under Tennessee's uninsured motorist statute. See Tenn. Code Ann. ยง 56-7-1206(a) (1994). Weil sought to recover damages under the uninsured motorist provision of her automobile insurance policy for the injuries caused to her by Gaia, an uninsured motorist. In State Farm's answer, it denied coverage to Weil under the uninsured motorist provision and sought a determination of its coverage obligation under the policy. In the alternative, State Farm asserted that Weil's complaint sought damages in excess of the coverage limits of the policy and that she was not entitled to recovery in excess of those limits. Finally, State Farm contended that Weil's injuries were not "caused by an accident arising out of the operation, maintenance or use of an uninsured motor vehicle," and therefore her injuries were not covered by the insurance policy. The State Farm uninsured motorist policy provision reads: We will pay compensatory damages for bodily injury an insured is legally entitled to collect from the owner or driver of an uninsured motor vehicle. The bodily injury must be caused by accident arising out of the operation, maintenance or use of uninsured motor vehicle.
The above provision is the only policy p
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