The accidental deaths of two teenage boys at an excavation site in 1997 were separate occurrences under the liability insurance policy of the property owner, the Illinois Supreme Court has ruled in reinstating a $2 million judgment against the insurer.
In Addison Insurance Company v. Donna Fay, in a Jan. 23 opinion written by Justice Rita Garman, the high court found that there was not enough evidence to conclude that the deaths were close enough to be considered a single occurrence as Addison Insurance and the appellate court maintained.
The doctor who performed the autopsies concluded that the immediate cause of one boy’s death was hypothermia and the other boy’s was drowning secondary to hypothermia.
Addison’s forensic expert concurred with those findings and neither of the physicians could conclude with any certainty the time of death of either boy, or how closely in time the boys had perished.
The Supreme Court applied the limiting principle or “time and space” test that the appellate court used but came to a different conclusion on the facts. The court found that there was not enough evidence to know whether he boys’ death were “simultaneous or so closely linked in time and space as to be considered by the average person as one event.”
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