## Facts

- Minnesota contracted with Berghuis Construction Company and Minnesota Valley Improvement Company to build and reroute traffic for a Highway 60 expressway project near Madelia.
- The project included a new two-lane roadway and temporary blacktop connections to shift traffic between old and new alignments.
- The new facility and temporary connections were opened to traffic in August 1972; the project later entered an authorized winter suspension in November 1972.
- On January 2, 1973, during winter suspension, a head-on collision occurred on the bypass between a vehicle occupied by E. Lester Zinnel, his wife, and their children, and a vehicle driven by Albert M. Teigum.
- Zinnel and two children were injured; Zinnel’s wife and Teigum died.
- No eyewitnesses survived, and the physical evidence did not clearly establish how the collision occurred or which vehicle crossed into the other lane.
- Zinnel sued the contractors for wrongful death and personal injuries, alleging negligent signing, striping, and barricading at the construction project.

## Issues

1. Whether the plaintiff’s evidence was sufficient to allow a jury to find that negligent signing, striping, or barricading by the contractors was a proximate cause of the collision, rather than leaving causation to speculation where the proof supported inconsistent inferences.

## Decision

- The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed the directed verdict for the contractors.
- The court held the plaintiff failed to present non-speculative proof that any negligent traffic control measures proximately caused the collision.
- Because the evidence supported multiple inconsistent explanations for the crash with no reasonable basis to choose one, the claim could not be submitted to the jury.

## Legal Principles

- A negligence claim requires proof of proximate cause by reasonable inference, not guesswork.
- When circumstantial evidence regarding causation equally supports two or more inconsistent inferences, the plaintiff has not met the burden of proof on causation.
- In that situation, a directed verdict for the defendant is proper because a jury finding of causation would rest on conjecture.

## Conclusion

The court upheld judgment for the highway contractors because the record did not permit a reasonable inference that any deficiency in traffic control caused the fatal collision; the proof left causation equally consistent with competing, inconsistent explanations.


Zinnel v. Berghuis Constr. Co., 274 N.W.2d 495 (Minn. 1979)