## Facts

- Genoveva Anaya and Alfredo Vides and their 11-year-old daughter, Norma Vides, were involved in a traffic collision with City of Los Angeles trash trucks stopped in a roadway lane.
- Norma was seriously injured and was transported by a City helicopter for medical treatment.
- The helicopter crashed during transport, killing Norma.
- The parents sued the City and three City employees (trash-truck drivers/operators) for wrongful death and related claims, alleging negligence connected to the roadway events that led to Norma’s need for emergency air transport.
- The individual employees demurred, arguing Norma’s death in the helicopter crash was too remote and unforeseeable to support liability.

## Issues

1. Whether, on demurrer, the helicopter crash was a superseding cause as a matter of law such that the individual defendants’ alleged negligence could not be a legal cause of Norma’s death.
2. Whether plaintiffs adequately pleaded that the individual defendants’ alleged negligence was a substantial factor in causing death occurring during medical transport necessitated by the initial collision.

## Decision

- The Court of Appeal granted writ relief.
- The court held the trial court erred by sustaining the individual defendants’ demurrers.
- The court concluded the pleadings were sufficient to allege that the individual defendants’ negligence was a substantial factor in causing Norma’s death.
- The court held the helicopter crash was not so unforeseeable, as a matter of law on the pleadings, as to cut off liability.

## Legal Principles

- Legal causation exists when a defendant’s negligent conduct is a substantial factor in bringing about harm and no rule of law relieves the defendant from liability.
- An intervening act does not relieve an original tortfeasor of liability if the intervening act was reasonably foreseeable; foreseeability concerns the general risk of harm, not the precise intervening mechanism.
- An original tortfeasor may be liable for injuries or death occurring during efforts to rescue or provide medical treatment, including harm occurring during transportation undertaken to obtain such treatment.
- Whether an intervening event is extraordinary enough to constitute a superseding cause is ordinarily a fact question not suitable for resolution on demurrer when the complaint plausibly alleges a causal chain from the initial injury to treatment-related harm.

## Conclusion

The court allowed the wrongful-death claims against the individual City employees to proceed, holding that death during emergency medical transport can fall within the scope of risk created by an initial traffic collision and that a helicopter crash is not categorically a superseding cause on demurrer.


Anaya v. Superior Court, 78 Cal. App. 4th 971 (Ct. App. 2000)