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La Quinta Inns, Inc. v. Leech | 658 S.E.2d 637 (2008)
To be liable for negligence, the defendant’s breach of duty must be the proximate cause of the harm in question. Sometimes, an intervening act or force breaks the causal chain, defeating proximate cause and relieving the defendant of liability. A Georgia appellate court considered whether an act of suicide had this effect in the two thousand eight case La Quinta Inns versus Leech.
In May of two thousand four, John Leech was separated from his wife and living in a third-floor room at a La Quinta Inn. On the twentieth, Leech went to dinner with his girlfriend, adult son James, and friend John Rivera. James and Rivera were both in the area for Leech’s teenage daughter Ashley’s graduation. After dinner, the group rendezvoused with Ashley, who angrily confronted Leech about having an extramarital affair.
Sometime around midnight, Leech went back to the La Quinta Inn by himself. He stopped at the front desk, where he booked a seventh-floor smoking room for Rivera and had a friendly conversation with the front-desk agent, Linda Cotton. About an hour later, James and Rivera arrived at the hotel, asking for Leech’s room number. Cotton called the third-floor room, but nobody answered, so she called the seventh-floor room. Leech answered and told Cotton not to give James and Rivera his room number.
Then Leech called James on his cell phone. Within minutes, Leech started making disturbing comments, including apologizing for past events and asking James to tell the family that he was sorry because he wouldn’t be there to do it himself. James covered the speaker so that Leech wouldn’t hear and urged Rivera to get help. Rivera asked Cotton to give them Leech’s room number and call the police because Leech was a suicide risk, but Cotton refused for several minutes.
When James yelled at Cotton to hurry up and do something, Leech overheard, told James that it was already too late, and ended the call. At that point, Cotton finally called nine one one. When the police arrived, Cotton gave them both room numbers but failed to mention that Leech was probably in the seventh-floor room. The police went to the third-floor room, and James went to the seventh-floor room. From outside the door, James could hear Leech talking on the phone. James knocked on the door without success before kicking it in, noticing that the window was open, and finding Leech’s body on the ground outside.
Leech’s wife Carol, who also served as the representative of his estate, filed a wrongful-death action against La Quinta and Cotton, blaming Leech’s death on their negligence. The state trial court denied La Quinta and Cotton’s motion for summary judgment, and they appealed to the Georgia Court of Appeals.
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