Glover v. Oakwood Terrace Associated II Ltd.

816 S.W.2d 43, 1991 Tenn. App. LEXIS 314
CourtCourt of Appeals of Tennessee
DecidedMay 10, 1991
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 816 S.W.2d 43 (Glover v. Oakwood Terrace Associated II Ltd.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Tennessee primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Glover v. Oakwood Terrace Associated II Ltd., 816 S.W.2d 43, 1991 Tenn. App. LEXIS 314 (Tenn. Ct. App. 1991).

Opinions

OPINION

WILLIAM H. INMAN, Special Judge.

I

This is a personal injury action arising out of an accident to an admitted trespasser at a closed swimming pool at Oakwood Terrace Apartments in Chattanooga on May 15, 1988. Plaintiff Edward L. Barnes, who was sixteen years and eleven months old on that date, was paralyzed when he apparently struck his head on the bottom of the pool while diving. He and his mother, Bonita Glover, brought this action based upon theories of negligence and negligence per se.

The pool was rectangular and measured approximately forty by twenty-five feet. Its depth ranged from three feet to six feet. It had no diving board and was not designed for diving. On the date of the accident, two signs were posted in the pool area. On these signs were printed:

Warning — No lifeguard on duty. Children under 14 should not use pool without an adult in attendance.
State Law

Printed on another sign were the “Pool Rules”, two of which were:

1. All persons using pool do so at own risk — Owners and management not responsible for accidents or injuries.
2. Pool is for tenants’ use ... Others with management permission only.

There was no “No Diving” sign in the pool area, which was completely enclosed with a six foot high chain link fence with a gate. On May 15, 1988, the date of the accident, the pool was closed and the gate was padlocked.

Edward Barnes would have been seventeen years of age eighteen days after the accident. He had learned to swim when he was between two and four years old, and thereafter swam on a regular basis. In 1987, he went swimming about twenty times in local community pools in the Chattanooga area. These pools had diving boards, and he regularly dived and jumped off them. He had hit his chest on the bottom of pools on at least two occasions when he was diving.

Barnes had his driver’s license, and his mother bought a car for his use and entrusted it to him. He had worked in a restaurant, was a good athlete, was in the tenth grade at school and a poor student. His “mental age” was said to be twelve to fourteen years.

Young Barnes arrived at the pool on May 15 between 12:00 noon and 1:00 p.m., with two friends, Ginika McKinney and Sylvester Pryor. None of the three was a tenant at the apartment complex and none had an invitation to swim in the pool. Although the pool was closed and the gate was padlocked when they arrived, there were several people inside the fence in the pool area, some of whom had climbed over the fence while others had pulled up the fence and crawled under it.

Barnes and his two friends then proceeded to climb over the fence where it joined a [45]*45retaining wall. After entering the pool, he swam, jumped, and played for three or four hours, during which he was in both the deep and shallow ends of the pool. He dived into both ends of the pool on several occasions and swam from one end of the pool to the other. When he dived he held his hands out in front of him so his face would not hit the bottom. On his last dive into the pool at approximately 4:00 p.m. he apparently struck his head on the bottom and fractured two of the vertebrae in his neck which rendered him a quadraplegic. The testimony was conflicting as to the location of the last dive. One witness said he dived off the deep end while other said the shallow end. Barnes did not recall what happened, owing to his injury.

Velia Foster and her 14 year old daughter, Katherlyn, had an apartment located over the pool area at the apartment complex. She testified that children frequently swam in the pool, and that the apartment manager had told her that “unauthorized kids were playing in the pool.”

On the day of the accident, even though the pool gate was locked, the pool area was crowded. Velia Foster’s daughter and two of her nieces entered the pool area by stepping up on the retaining wall and going through an opening between the wall and the fence. Edward Barnes and his friends entered the pool area the same way. Teenage children from the surrounding neighborhood were continuously coming into the pool area but the management took no action to block the entrance at the wall.

On that day, Katherlyn saw Edward Barnes dive into the pool at the deep end. He did not appear to be frolicking. They were never ordered to leave the area.

The case was tried to a jury on June 20-21, 1990. At the close of plaintiffs’ proof, defendants moved for a directed verdict which the trial court denied. At the conclusion of all the proof, defendants again moved for a directed verdict, and again it was denied. The jury returned verdicts of $300,000.00 for Barnes and $100,000.00 for Glover, and the motion for judgment NOV or for a new trial was denied.

II

The ease was allowed to go to the jury on the attractive nuisance theory, although the instructions included various references to a trap, and to ordinary and gross negligence. It thus becomes our duty to determine if the evidence favorable to the plaintiffs, together with all reasonable inferences to be drawn therefrom, supports the verdict under any pleaded theory. Rule 13(d) Rules of Appellate procedure. We cannot weigh the evidence, Holmes v. Wilson, 551 S.W.2d 682 (Tenn.1977); Crosslin v. Alsup, 594 S.W.2d 379 (Tenn.1980), and must take the strongest legitimate view of the evidence in favor of the plaintiffs.

The appellees argue that sufficient evidence was presented that the pool was a trap, justifying a verdict for the plaintiffs. In Toole v. Levitt, 492 S.W.2d 230 (Tenn.App.1972), a trap is defined as “any hidden, dangerous condition which a person who does not know the premises could not avoid by reasonable care and skill”. An expert for the plaintiffs testified that “there’s a ridge runs across where the lifeline was about three or four inches inside the lifeline when I dove down and swam around on the pool. It comes up approximately an inch in my estimation”. He also testified that the depth markers were misleading because the water’s depth, on the day he gauged it, was only five feet, nine inches. We need not belabor the point. In our view this swimming pool did not constitute a trap — even for the unwary — much less for an experienced swimmer who had been in the pool for about four hours. In Toole, supra, the swimming pool was held not to constitute a trap, and the circumstances of that case are far more pronounced than here. It is not disputed that the water was clear, the depth marked, the pool was free of foreign objects, was surrounded by a fence six-feet high, the gate was padlocked, and that young Barnes trespassed for three or four hours before his diving accident.

Ill

In Metropolitan Government of Nashville in Davidson County v. Counts, 541 [46]*46S.W.2d 133 (Tenn.1976), the Supreme Court adopted as the law of Tennessee Section 339 of the Restatement (2d) of Torts to set out the elements of the doctrine of Attractive Nuisance, which- are:

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Bluebook (online)
816 S.W.2d 43, 1991 Tenn. App. LEXIS 314, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/glover-v-oakwood-terrace-associated-ii-ltd-tennctapp-1991.