## Facts

- The Bakers hired Honeywell to install a home alarm system and paid a monthly fee for Honeywell to monitor it.
- The monitoring arrangement required Honeywell’s central station to receive alarm signals and then telephone the public authority listed in the subscriber’s account information.
- The contract limited Honeywell’s liability to the Bakers for system failure to $250.
- A fire started in the Bakers’ basement furnace room.
- Mrs. Baker manually activated the alarm, and Honeywell received the signal at 2:54 p.m.
- The dispatcher pulled up the Bakers’ account data, which directed the dispatcher to call the Indianapolis Fire Department.
- The Bakers lived outside Indianapolis’s jurisdiction, so the Indianapolis department was not the correct department to dispatch to the home.
- It took two additional calls for the dispatcher to reach the correct fire department; firefighters were dispatched at 2:58 p.m.
- The fire chief arrived at about 3:00 p.m.; at about 3:05 p.m., teams began advancing hoses into the house through the front door and garage.
- Firefighter David Edwards was leading a hose through the garage when the floor collapsed; he fell into the basement and died from his injuries.
- Edwards’s widow alleged Honeywell negligently failed to keep accurate fire-district information for subscribers and negligently delayed notifying the correct department, and that the delay allowed conditions to worsen so that the floor failed when Edwards entered.

## Issues

1. Whether, under Indiana negligence law, Honeywell owed a duty of care to a firefighter responding to a subscriber’s fire based on Honeywell’s alleged delay in reaching the correct fire department.
2. Whether Honeywell’s contractual undertaking to the homeowners, including its limited-liability clause, supported extending a tort duty to a noncustomer firefighter injured while responding.

## Decision

- The Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Honeywell.
- The court held that, even assuming Honeywell was careless and the delay contributed to the fatal conditions, Indiana law did not recognize a tort duty running from Honeywell to firefighters responding to a subscriber’s fire.
- Because the lack of duty ended the case, the court did not need to resolve other negligence elements in depth.

## Legal Principles

- Duty in negligence is a threshold legal question that sets the boundary of liability; factual cause and foreseeability do not automatically establish a duty.
- A defendant’s contractual obligations generally run to the contracting party; a service contract does not, without more, create tort duties to an open-ended group of third parties who may be affected by performance.
- Foreseeability of harm may inform duty analysis, but courts may still deny a duty where recognizing it would create large, hard-to-define exposure disproportionate to the defendant’s role.
- Tort liability is tied to deterrence and practical risk control; where the defendant’s conduct occurs after the primary hazard (here, a fire) has already begun, imposing liability to remote third parties may add little incentive for safety relative to the costs of expanded liability.
- In assessing duty, courts may consider the plaintiff’s status as a professional responder to dangers created by others and whether extending liability for incremental response risks would push negligence law beyond manageable limits.

## Conclusion

Applying Indiana negligence law, the Seventh Circuit concluded that Honeywell’s monitoring contract with the homeowners did not extend a tort duty of care to firefighters responding to a fire at the subscriber’s home, so the widow’s negligence claim failed as a matter of law even if the four-minute dispatch delay foreseeably increased the danger at the scene.


Edwards v. Honeywell, 50 F.3d 484 (1995)