A Challenged Man Took the Fall for a Crash But Amended Complaint Came Too Late
For an establishment to be sued on liquor liability grounds in Florida, plaintiffs must show that the bartender knew the over-served, drunken driver was an addict.
The plaintiffs also cannot expect to prevail if an amended complaint—naming a different driver—is substantially different from the initial lawsuit and was filed years later, a Florida appeals court said this week in a case that involved a Tampa bowling alley, a 2014 crash that killed a 27-year-old, and court proceedings that were complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and lost evidence.
The plaintiffs were the father of victim Larry James Sillaway, who died in the crash, and the injured passenger, Dawn Edgerton. Their legal team did not substitute the name of a different alleged drunken driver until 2022. That was eight years after the crash and nearly six years after the initial suit was filed. That substitution and delay had unfairly hamstrung the defense for Brandon Crossroads Bowl in Tampa, the 2nd District Court of Appeals said in upholding a Hillsborough County Circuit Court judge’s decision.
By the time the amended complaint was filed, critical evidence had been lost and at least one key witness had died.
“Because Sillaway and Edgerton’s amended complaint necessarily predicated Brandon Crossroads’s liability on a brand-new factual narrative, the trial court did not err in concluding that the amended complaint did not relate back,” the appellate panel concluded.
The tragic and confused story began Aug. 10, 2014. Three men, Andrew Connell, Sam Meredith, and Jesus Ronduelas, went to the bowling alley and drank heavily, including shots of liquor, court filings show. After leaving the bar, the Ford pickup the men were in crashed into the car driven by Sillaway, killing Sillaway and seriously injuring Edgerton.
The only person found at the scene after the crash was Ronduelas, a cognitively and physically impaired person, the court explained. A year later, Ronduelas pleaded guilty to DUI manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
A year after that—just before the statute of limitations on wrongful death suits kicked in—the Sillaway estate and Edgerton filed suit, naming Ronduelas as the driver of the truck and alleging that Brandon Crossroads had known he was an alcoholic and kept serving him.
But when Ronduelas was deposed in 2018, he said he had not been driving at all but was passed out in the bed of the pickup. After Connell was deposed, the court suggested that it seemed that Connell and Meredith may have fled the scene after the crash, leaving the mentally challenged Rondeulas to take the blame.
To complicate matters, Meredith died of cancer in 2021, before he could be deposed.
When it became clear that Ronduelas may have been made the scapegoat, Sillaway and Edgerton in 2022 moved to file an amended complaint, naming either Connell or Meredith as the probable driver.
The bowling establishment’s lawyers, with the insurance defense law firm of Rumberger Kirk, objected. The circuit court agreed.
The judge granted summary judgment for the bowling alley owners, effectively dismissing the suit. The judge pointed out that under 2014 revisions to Florida’s liquor liability statute, the plaintiffs would have to now show that the bartenders knew that Connell or Meredith were habitual addicts and served them anyway.
But in the eight years since the crash, evidence had been lost, memories had faded and at least one witnesses had died.
On appeal from the plaintiffs, the 2nd District Court of Appeals noted that a 2017 Florida Supreme Court decision known as Kopel vs. Kopel does give plaintiffs some leeway in amending their lawsuit complaints, “as long as the initial complaint gives the defendant fair notice of the general factual scenario or factual underpinning of the claim, amendments stating new legal theories can relate back,” the Kopel opinion stated.
But the high court in that case had also said that an amended claim could fail to meet the relation-back test if the new claim is so factually distinct that it “does not arise out of the same conduct, transaction, or occurrence as the original.”
The 2nd DCA found that Sillaway’s amended complaint was too different from the original, requiring the bar to defend against its supposed knowledge of the addiction conditions of a whole new set of drivers of the truck—as well as which employees may have served them booze.
Also, the court said, other relevant court decisions that support amended complaints speak only to vicarious liability.
“Brandon Crossroads’s liability is derivative, rather than vicarious, because it can be liable for the injuries caused to Larry James (Sillaway) or Edgerton only if one of its employees engaged in a wrongful act of his or her own (here, knowingly serving a habitual alcoholic),” 2nd DCA Judge Susan Rothstein-Youakim wrote in the opinion.
The judge added: “Sillaway and Edgerton’s argument that Brandon Crossroads was on notice that its employees had wrongfully provided alcohol to someone at the bowling alley that night is like arguing that a malpractice complaint against a hospital relates back because the hospital was on notice that its employees had committed malpractice on someone at the hospital on the alleged date.”
The father of the crash victim did not live to see the outcome of the appeal. Larry Joe Sillaway died of COVID-19 in 2022.
“Larry never really got over his son’s death,” the father’s obituary reads. “He would honor his son in his artwork or (in) the loving and caring way he spoke of his son to others.”
Linda Bellomio Commons, the Tampa-based plaintiffs’ attorney for Sillaway, said it’s uncertain if the estate will appeal further, to the state Supreme Court.
“Maybe. I’m certainly not happy with the outcome,” Commons said.
She noted that the 2nd DCA opinion placed too much emphasis on the lawsuit’s naming of a new driver in the crash. The key point to consider, she said, is that state law and case law require only that the defendants be put on notice for the amended complaint to relate back sufficiently to the initial complaint.
“They had notice. The director of the corporation was knowledgeable the whole time,” Commons said.
The case may present a number of grounds for further appeal, she said: The litigation was plagued with problems from the beginning, including a backlogged court docket due to the COVID pandemic, lost video evidence of the men drinking at the bar due to a ransomware hack, and a change in judges, Commons said.
Florida’s drunken driving statute, requiring an establishment’s knowledge of a patron’s drinking history, creates too high of a bar for many injured plaintiffs, she added.
The court will likely award attorneys’ fees to the defense team because the Rumberger Kirk lawyers had proposed a settlement in 2024—of less than $50,000 for the Sillaway estate—but the plaintiffs rejected that and the defendant corporations ended up paying nothing.
The name of the bowling alley’s insurance carrier was not mentioned in the complaints or other court records.
