## Facts

- Jane Doe, a meter reader, was working in a New London neighborhood described as a high-crime area.
- A man approached Doe on Green Street and, after she attempted to help, produced a gun and forced her from the sidewalk through an abutting vacant lot.
- The assailant forced Doe onto property owned by Seymour Manheimer, approximately 50–70 feet from the sidewalk, into an area between Manheimer’s building and the lot boundary.
- Overgrown bushes and tall grass on the property screened the area from view from the street and sidewalk.
- The assailant raped Doe for approximately thirty minutes, using items (including rope and rubber gloves) brought with him; the assailant was never identified.
- Doe suffered severe psychological harm, including suicide attempts and ongoing psychiatric hospitalization.
- Doe claimed Manheimer negligently failed to remove the overgrowth, and that the concealment enabled the attack by reducing visibility to passersby.

## Issues

1. Whether a landowner may be liable in negligence for a third party’s sexual assault occurring on the landowner’s property when the alleged negligence is failure to remove overgrown vegetation that concealed the area.
2. Whether the failure to remove the overgrowth was a “substantial factor” in causing Doe’s injuries, satisfying proximate cause despite the intervening criminal act.

## Decision

- The Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed the trial court’s judgment setting aside the jury verdict for Doe.
- The court held that, as a matter of law, the evidence did not permit a finding that the overgrowth was a substantial factor in producing Doe’s injuries.
- The court treated the rape as an intervening, superseding cause that broke the chain of legal causation.
- Because proximate cause was not established, Manheimer was not liable under Doe’s negligence-based theories.

## Legal Principles

- Proximate cause requires more than cause-in-fact; the defendant’s conduct must be a substantial factor in bringing about the harm.
- A landowner’s liability for conditions on land is generally confined to harms that result from physical contact with the condition, not harms that merely take advantage of the condition’s existence (e.g., concealment).
- A deliberate third-party criminal act may constitute a superseding cause when the plaintiff’s injury is outside the foreseeable scope of the risk created by the defendant’s conduct.
- General awareness of crime in an area does not, without more, make a landowner legally responsible for violent crimes facilitated only incidentally by ordinary features or conditions of the premises.

## Conclusion

The court concluded that the overgrown vegetation’s role was, at most, incidental to the assailant’s planned criminal conduct and too attenuated to qualify as a substantial factor; the rape was a superseding cause outside the risk that made the vegetation condition negligent, requiring judgment for the landowner.


Doe v. Manheimer, 212 Conn. 748, 563 A.2d 699 (Conn. 1989)