## Facts

- Timothy Matlock (17) bought two packs of cigarettes and gave one pack to his friend Eric Erdley (15).
- The boys trespassed into a private storage yard where numerous telephone poles were stacked and climbed/walked on the stacked poles with two younger children.
- Erdley, while smoking, was jostled when a younger child ran into his arm, causing Erdley to drop a lit cigarette between the poles onto sand.
- Erdley attempted briefly to retrieve and extinguish the cigarette but was unsuccessful.
- The boys left the immediate area; roughly 20 minutes later they saw flames at the base of the poles and ran away.
- The fire caused substantial property damage to the storage-yard owner and resulted in fire-department response costs.
- Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company, Erdley’s liability insurer, paid amounts totaling $100,000 to the property owner and fire agencies and then sued Timothy and Timothy’s father, Paul Matlock, seeking contribution via subrogation.

## Issues

1. Whether Timothy’s acts (furnishing cigarettes to a minor and participating in the trespass/horseplay) were a proximate cause of the later fire damage, or whether the causal chain was too remote and unforeseeable to impose negligence liability.
2. Whether an alleged violation of California Penal Code § 308 (furnishing tobacco to minors) could support negligence per se for the type of harm suffered (fire-related property damage and response costs).
3. Whether Paul could be held liable under a parental liability statute absent proven liability by Timothy for the fire loss.

## Decision

- The Court of Appeal reversed the judgment for Wawanesa.
- The court found no legally sufficient basis to hold Timothy liable for the fire damage because the connection between Timothy’s conduct and the loss was too attenuated to satisfy foreseeability-based limits on negligence liability.
- The court rejected using Penal Code § 308 as negligence per se because the loss was not within the statute’s protective purpose.
- Because Timothy was not liable, the derivative judgment against Paul under the parental liability statute also failed.

## Legal Principles

- Negligence liability requires more than factual causation; proximate cause and duty are limited by foreseeability and policy-based constraints on highly improbable, fortuitous chains of events.
- Negligence per se based on a statutory violation applies only when (a) the plaintiff is within the class of persons the statute aims to protect and (b) the injury is of the type the statute was designed to prevent.
- A statute regulating furnishing tobacco to minors does not, without more, extend civil liability to remote property-fire losses not targeted by the statute’s protective purpose.
- Derivative parental liability dependent on a minor’s actionable misconduct cannot stand where the minor’s underlying tort liability is not established.

## Conclusion

The court set aside the insurer’s subrogation recovery for fire damage, holding that the events linking Timothy’s furnishing of cigarettes to the eventual blaze were too remote to be foreseeable negligence, and that Penal Code § 308 could not be used to impose negligence per se for this type of property loss; without Timothy’s liability, the parental-liability award against Paul could not stand.


Wawanesa Mut. Ins. Co. v. Matlock, 60 Cal. App. 4th 583 (Cal. Ct. App. 1997)