By Gary Chester, Senior Writer
Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara has been home to the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers since 2014. Four years into the team’s lease, the adequacy of security at the venue came into question when one fan assaulted another fan in the parking lot. David Gonzales punched Mark Stokes twice in the face, causing permanent brain damage that allegedly caused Stokes to suffer a fatal asthma attack in 2021.
Stokes’s wife and children filed a civil complaint in California state court alleging that Forty Niners Stadium Management Co. and Landmark Event Staffing Services were negligent in failing to prevent the assault, and in failing to provide adequate security. The trial court found there was no breach of duty and granted summary judgment to the defendants. Stokes’s appeal was decided in Stokes v. Forty Niners Management Co., 2024 Cal. App. Unpub. LEXIS 8058 (Ct. of Appeal of Cal., Sixth App. Dist., December 19, 2024).
A Sudden, Violent Assault
On October 7, 2018, disappointed fans filed out of Levi’s Stadium after the Arizona Cardinals defeated the 49ers, 28-18. The Cardinals pummeled Niners quarterback C.J. Beathard with four sacks, but none were as brutal as the assault that took place in the Red Lot 1 parking area after the game. Pretrial testimony and video evidence showed that Stokes and Gonzales had both consumed alcoholic beverages throughout the afternoon, and that the incident lasted but a few seconds: Stokes kicked an empty glass bottle on the ground that struck Gonzalez’s vehicle, and Gonzales immediately punched Stokes in the face before driving away. (Gonzalez was later arrested, and he pleaded guilty to assault.)
The complaint alleged that Stadium Management and Landmark were liable for failing to provide adequate security, permitting known criminals to be present, promoting excessive consumption of alcohol while failing to eject from the premises persons exhibiting drunk or disorderly conduct, and other negligent conduct. In May 2022, the defendants filed motions for summary judgment.
Stadium Management argued that it did not breach any duty of care and that the plaintiffs could not prove causation due to the intervening, unforeseeable criminal assault. It argued that its security measures were adequate and far more robust than the security employed at a Major League Baseball stadium that the court found to have been sufficient in Noble v. Los Angeles Dodgers, Inc., 168 Cal.App.3d 912, (1985). There, the court held that the plaintiff could not prove that inadequate security directly caused a post-game melee in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. The court referred to broad allegations of inadequate security as “abstract negligence,” and stated that landowners are not insurers of one’s safety on their property.
Landmark argued that it owed no duty to Stokes “to ensure his safety by preventing unforeseeable spontaneous attacks” and that the plaintiffs’ claim for premises liability was not maintainable because it did not own, lease, occupy, or control Levi’s Stadium.
The plaintiffs argued that Landmark had failed to show there was adequate security personnel in the parking lot, and that an issue of fact existed as to whether Landmark’s failure to enforce the stadium’s policies against loitering, tailgating, and drinking alcohol in the parking areas after kickoff was a direct cause of the incident.
The plaintiffs relied on deposition testimony from witnesses who had accompanied both Stokes and Gonzalez who said there was no security in Red Lot 1 at the stadium when the incident took place. One witness testified that after the assault, he ran toward the stadium looking for security or police for assistance, but he did not locate anyone.
The plaintiffs also relied on a well-known sports safety expert, Gil Fried, a professor at the University of West Florida, who opined that the failure of both defendants to enforce venue policies likely caused or contributed to the incident. In addition, a board-certified neurologist concluded that Stokes’s traumatic brain injury was a cause of his death.
Evidence of Causation, or Pure Conjecture?
The trial court granted summary judgment because Stadium Management had met its burden of showing an absence of causation, and because Fried’s opinions on causation were based on “speculation and conjecture.” The court similarly found that Landmark had met its burden of showing an absence of causation, and had also demonstrated that it did not have the “requisite control, ownership, leasing, or occupation of Levi’s Stadium such that it could be held liable for premises liability.”
On the plaintiffs’ appeal, the California Court of Appeals noted that even though a premises “owner is not an insurer of the safety of its patrons, [he or she] does owe them a duty to exercise reasonable care in keeping the premises reasonably safe.” The court considered several precedents, including Saelzer v. Advanced Group 400, 25 Cal.4th 763 (2001), and Leslie G. v. Perry & Associates, 43 Cal.App.4th (1996).
In Saelzer, the trial court dismissed a claim by a Federal Express delivery driver who had been assaulted while delivering a package at an apartment complex, citing a lack of evidence proving causation. The appeals court reversed, finding that strong evidence of much criminal activity at the complex created an issue of fact as to whether the complex provided adequate security. The California Supreme Court reversed, based on California’s rule that the plaintiff must establish an actual causal link between the plaintiff’s injury and the defendant’s failure to provide adequate security measures.
The plaintiff in Leslie G. was raped by an unknown assailant at 2 a.m. in the underground parking garage of her apartment building. The trial judge dismissed her claim against the apartment building for inadequate security because the absence of similar incidents at the complex in the previous two years made the incident unforeseeable as a matter of law. The appellate court affirmed, stating that evidence of causation, whether by direct or circumstantial evidence, must be substantial and not based on “a mere possibility.”
The Court of Appeal in Stokes did not distinguish the facts from those in Saelzer, Leslie G., and other precedents, finding that Stadium Management and Landmark could not be found liable for “abstract negligence” without a causal connection between the alleged negligence and the injury. The opinion mirrored the holding in a similar case, Romero v. Los Angeles Rams, 91 Cal.App.5th (2023), which involved an assault on a football fan at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum following an NFL game. The court there stated that the “bare claim that more security personnel could have prevented a criminal attack shows only ‘abstract negligence.’”
The court in Romero observed that there must be evidence that the assailant took advantage of a lapse or omission in security “in the course of committing his attack, and that the omission was a substantial factor in causing the injury.”
The Court of Appeal also affirmed the trial judge’s finding that Fried’s expert opinions were speculative, and therefore inadmissible. The speculation was that if the defendants had provided “highly visible security,” then it likely would have deterred Gonzalez from assaulting Stokes. The court indicated that the plaintiff’s case required more specific facts to support Fried’s conclusions.
Analysis
It is important to recognize that in any assault, the primary legal liability would seem to rest with the assailant. A plaintiff’s attorney has a responsibility to the client to investigate a case against deep-pocket defendants, but the attorney needs to discover hard evidence to establish that a specific breach of the duty to provide security was a proximate cause of the attack.
Here, the appeals court recounted that there were at least 923 security personnel working the 49ers-Cardinals game that drew 53,582 fans. Security employees were posted to patrol the parking lots, some of whom maintained radio communication with the Stadium Command Center. It was incumbent on the plaintiffs to produce an expert opinion challenging the ratio of security personnel to the number of fans attending the game, or to establish that Levi’s Stadium personnel served Gonzalez alcoholic beverages while he was visibly intoxicated and that his condition contributed to the incident. However, Stokes and precedent cases make it clear that California law requires the plaintiff to discover a specific, direct link between the assailant and a security failure. It is a difficult standard to meet.
