For an establishment to be sued on liquor liability grounds in Florida, plaintiffs must show that the bartender knew the over-served, drunken driver was an addict.
The plaintiffs also cannot expect to prevail if an amended complaint—naming a different driver—is s
ubstantially different from the initial lawsuit and was filed years later, a Florida appeals court said this week in a case that involved a Tampa bowling alley, a 2014 crash that killed a 27-year-old, and court proceedings that were complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and lost evidence.
The plaintiffs were the father of victim Larry James Sillaway, who died in the crash, and the injured passenger Dawn Edgerton. Their legal team did not substitute the name of a different alleged drunken driver until 2022. That
was eight years after the crash and nearly six years after the initial suit was filed. That substitution and delay had unfairly hamstrung the defense for Brandon Crossroads Bowl in Tampa, the 2nd District Court of Appeals said in upholding a Hillsborough County Circuit Court judge’s decision.
By the time the amended complaint was filed, critical evidence had been lost and at least one key witness had died.
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“Because Sillaway and Edgerton’s amended complaint necessarily predicated Brandon Crossroads’s liability on a brand-new factual narrative, the trial court did not err in concluding that the amended complaint did not relate back,” the appellate panel concluded.
The tragic and confused story began Aug. 10, 2014. Three men, Andrew Connell, Sam Meredith, and Jesus Ronduelas, went to the bowling alley and drank heavily, in
cluding shots of liquor, court filings show. After leaving the bar, the Ford pickup the men were in crashed into the car driven by Sillaway, killing Sillaway and seriously injuring Edgerton.
The only person found at the scene after the crash was Ronduelas, a cognitively and physically impaired person, the court explained. A year later, Ronduelas pleaded guilty to DUI manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
A year after that—just before the statute of limitations on wrongful death suits kicked in—the Sillaway estate and Edgerton filed suit, naming Ronduelas as the driver of the truck and alleging that Brandon Crossroads had known he was an alcoholic and kept serving him.
But when Ronduelas was deposed in 2018, he said he had not been driving at all but was passed out in the bed of the pickup. After Connell was deposed, the court suggested that it seemed that Connell and Meredith may have fled the scene after the crash, leaving the mentally challenged Rondeulas to take the blame.
To complicate matters, Meredith died of cancer in 2021, before he could be deposed.
When it became clear that Ronduelas may have been made the scapegoat, Sillaway and Edgerton in 2022 moved to file an amended complaint, naming either Connell or Meredith as the probable driver.