## Facts

- Beth Ann Johnson and Eric Johnson were estranged and involved in divorce proceedings; Beth previously obtained a restraining order after Eric threatened her and held her at gunpoint overnight.
- Eric was a student pilot taking flight lessons at the Lawrence County airport and had a scheduled lesson on March 5, 2007.
- Lance Jacobs, an airport employee, gave Eric keys to the hangar and aircraft under a routine practice allowing student pilots to access the plane and wait for an instructor; Eric declined Jacobs’s offer to help with the hangar doors.
- Eric took off alone, without an instructor, with the couple’s eight-year-old daughter Emily as a passenger.
- During the flight, Eric repeatedly called Beth, yelling and cursing.
- Witnesses observed the plane approach the airport as if to land, then increase throttle, bank sharply, and descend steeply into the home of Beth’s mother, Vivian Pace.
- Eric and Emily died in the crash; investigators concluded the probable cause was suicide.
- Beth sued airport personnel and county-related defendants, alleging negligent security and supervision that allowed an unqualified student pilot to take the aircraft and fly with a passenger, causing Emily’s death.

## Issues

1. Whether the designated evidence established as a matter of law that Eric intentionally crashed the aircraft into his mother-in-law’s home, killing himself and Emily.
2. If Eric acted intentionally, whether his intentional criminal conduct was a superseding intervening cause that severed proximate causation from any alleged negligence by the defendants.

## Decision

- The Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed summary judgment for all defendants.
- The court held the undisputed evidence supported only one inference: Eric intentionally crashed the plane into his mother-in-law’s home.
- The court held Eric’s intentional act was a superseding intervening cause, breaking any causal connection between alleged negligence in providing access to the aircraft and Emily’s death.
- Because proximate cause failed as a matter of law, defendants were entitled to judgment.

## Legal Principles

- Proximate cause is generally a fact question but becomes a question of law when the facts permit only a single reasonable conclusion.
- A negligent act is a proximate cause only if it sets in motion a natural, probable, and continuous sequence of events leading to the injury.
- An intervening intentional criminal act may be a superseding cause that relieves prior negligent actors of liability when the intentional conduct is not reasonably foreseeable.

## Conclusion

The court concluded that, even assuming negligence in airport practices allowed Eric access to the plane, his intentional use of the aircraft to kill himself and Emily was an unforeseeable, superseding intervening cause that defeated proximate cause and justified summary judgment for the defendants.


Johnson v. Jacobs, 970 N.E.2d 666 (Ind. Ct. App. 2011)