## Facts

- Lanny O’Neal possessed a Remington Model 700, .243 caliber bolt-action rifle manufactured in 1971.
- On November 9, 2008, while deer hunting from a pickup truck, O’Neal loaned the rifle to Mark Ritter.
- As Ritter began exiting the truck, he moved the safety from “on” to “off,” and the rifle discharged, killing O’Neal.
- The rifle had changed hands multiple times, creating uncertainty about its condition and whether it had been altered before it reached O’Neal.
- After O’Neal’s death, the rifle was retrieved by counsel but was not inspected by any expert.
- On March 26, 2010, Carol O’Neal retrieved the rifle and asked a friend to destroy it; the rifle was destroyed.
- After a later news report about alleged Model 700 problems, Carol O’Neal, as personal representative of the estate, filed a products-liability action on December 9, 2011, asserting design defect and causation.

## Issues

1. Whether Remington was collaterally estopped from contesting that the Model 700 was defectively designed based on prior litigation involving similar rifles or mechanisms.
2. Whether, without the specific rifle, the plaintiff produced sufficient admissible evidence that the rifle was defective when it left Remington’s control and that the defect caused the discharge.
3. Whether destruction of the rifle so prejudiced proof and defense that summary judgment was warranted.

## Decision

- The court denied the plaintiff’s motion for partial summary judgment seeking to establish defect through issue preclusion.
- The court granted Remington’s motion for summary judgment on all claims.
- The court concluded that prior litigation did not establish defect as a matter of law for the specific rifle at issue and that the record lacked product-specific evidence of defect and causation after the rifle’s destruction.

## Legal Principles

- Offensive non-mutual collateral estoppel requires, at minimum, an identical issue actually litigated and necessarily decided in prior litigation, and a full and fair opportunity to litigate; generalized findings about a product line do not automatically establish defect in a later case involving a different product unit and circumstances.
- In a strict-liability design-defect claim, the plaintiff must produce evidence that the particular product was defective when it left the manufacturer’s control and that the defect proximately caused the injury.
- Destruction of the allegedly defective product can be outcome-determinative because it may prevent product-specific inspection, limit expert analysis, impede alternative-causation testing, and leave the plaintiff unable to meet the burden of proof.

## Conclusion

The court entered judgment for Remington because issue preclusion could not establish defect for the particular rifle and, after the rifle was destroyed without inspection, the plaintiff lacked sufficient product-specific evidence for a reasonable jury to find a defect existing at sale that caused the fatal discharge.


O’Neal v. Remington Arms Co., LLC, No. 4:11-cv-04182, 2014 WL 993020 (D.S.D. Mar. 13, 2014)