## Facts

- Chestnut Motors, Inc. operated an automobile sales agency and garage in Philadelphia.
- A customer’s car was delivered to Chestnut Motors for repairs around 10:00 a.m.
- Employees left the car outside the garage, double-parked on the street, with the key in the ignition.
- The neighborhood allegedly had a high and increasing number of automobile thefts in the preceding months.
- About three hours later, an adult stranger stole the car.
- While driving the stolen car around the block, the thief drove onto a sidewalk and struck Liney, a pedestrian, causing serious injury.
- Liney sued Chestnut Motors in negligence, alleging the manner in which the car was left created an unreasonable risk that resulted in her injuries.

## Issues

1. Whether a garage that leaves a customer’s car double-parked with keys in the ignition in a high-theft area owes a duty to pedestrians later injured by the negligent driving of a thief who steals the car.
2. Whether the thief’s negligent operation of the stolen car constitutes a superseding cause that breaks proximate causation, making any negligence by the garage only a remote cause.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the trial court’s order sustaining preliminary objections in the nature of a demurrer and dismissing the complaint.
- Even assuming the garage employees were negligent, the court held the injury to the pedestrian was not a reasonably foreseeable result of leaving the car accessible to theft.
- The court held Chestnut Motors breached no duty owed to the plaintiff under these facts.
- The thief’s careless driving was an intervening, superseding cause, severing any causal link between the garage’s conduct and the plaintiff’s injuries.

## Legal Principles

- Negligence liability requires a breach of a duty owed to the plaintiff and harm that is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of that breach.
- Leaving a vehicle accessible to theft, without more, does not make the custodian liable to third parties for injuries caused by a thief’s subsequent negligent driving when that harm is not reasonably foreseeable.
- A third party’s criminal or negligent act may be a superseding cause that breaks proximate causation when it is not within the scope of the risk the defendant’s conduct made foreseeable (Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 302B, 448–449).
- Even if theft is foreseeable, negligent operation by the thief may still be treated as superseding absent facts putting the defendant on notice that such driving-related harm was likely.

## Conclusion

The court held that a garage’s alleged negligence in leaving a car unattended with keys in the ignition in a theft-prone area did not create a foreseeable risk that a thief would negligently injure a pedestrian, and that the thief’s careless driving was a superseding cause; the complaint therefore failed to state a negligence claim.


Liney v. Chestnut Motors, Inc., 421 Pa. 26, 218 A.2d 336 (Pa. 1966)