Background
On July 31, 2019, a vehicle driven by Lucas E. Ahrendt, a South Dakota resident passing through Nebraska en route to Colorado, struck a vehicle driven by Lee A. Bruce. Ahrendt was cited for following too close and appeared in Scotts Bluff County traffic court, where he pled guilty and paid a fine. After the accident, Ahrendt returned to Colorado where he had resided for several years.
Bruce did not file a civil negligence complaint until May 2021—nearly two years after the accident. That complaint and a second complaint filed in July 2022 were both dismissed for lack of service after unsuccessful attempts to locate and serve Ahrendt. A third complaint was finally filed on June 14, 2024, more than four years and 11 months after the accident occurred. At that point, Ahrendt was located and served while incarcerated in a Minnesota jail.
Ahrendt moved for summary judgment, arguing the complaint was time-barred under Nebraska’s four-year statute of limitations for negligence claims. Bruce countered that the statute of limitations should be tolled under Neb. Rev. Stat. § 25-214 because Ahrendt had “absconded or concealed himself” outside Nebraska from April 2021 onward, preventing service of process. The district court granted summary judgment for Ahrendt, finding Bruce had not proven absconding or concealment. Bruce appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Nebraska Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal, holding that Bruce failed to meet his burden of proving that Ahrendt absconded or concealed himself in the legal sense. The court emphasized that under Neb. Rev. Stat. § 25-214, tolling requires proof that the defendant “hide[s], conceal[s], or absent[s] himself clandestinely, with the intent to avoid legal process.” Difficulty in locating someone, lack of a settled address, or periods of homelessness do not satisfy this standard. The court found Ahrendt’s provision of his mother’s South Dakota address at the time of the accident and during the 2019 traffic court proceedings could not constitute concealment when Bruce did not file suit until 2021. The court also found that Ahrendt’s one-time failure to provide his address to a process server in June 2021 could have tolled the statute for only a brief period at most, and there remained two years to file suit after that incident.
The court distinguished this case from Farmers Mutual Insurance Co. v. Cox, where tolling was properly applied. There, the defendant was a Nebraska resident who fled the state, lived under an assumed name in California, and was unavailable for service until extradited after a criminal arrest. Ahrendt, by contrast, was a nonresident passing through Nebraska when the accident occurred, remained reachable by phone at times, and his difficulties in being located arose from transience and incarceration for unrelated reasons, not from deliberate evasion of this lawsuit. The statute of limitations expired on July 31, 2023, and the June 2024 filing was time-barred. Because Bruce’s evidence was insufficient as a matter of law to invoke tolling, the district court properly granted summary judgment without deciding whether the tolling statute even applies to nonresidents.
Key Takeaways
- Tolling under § 25-214 requires proof of absconding or concealment with intent to avoid legal process—not merely that a defendant is difficult to locate or transient.
- A plaintiff’s dilatory conduct in investigating and filing suit does not toll the statute of limitations; delayed filing does not convert ordinary difficulty in locating a defendant into unlawful concealment.
- Providing legitimate contact information at the time of injury or in contemporaneous proceedings, even if followed by relocation, is not concealment for tolling purposes when suit is not filed until years later.
- Summary judgment is appropriate when a plaintiff’s face-value claim is barred by statute of limitations and the plaintiff produces no evidence of tolling grounds.
Why It Matters
This decision provides important guidance on the threshold for statute of limitations tolling based on absconding or concealment. Courts will not lightly extend tolling provisions to rescue plaintiffs from their own delay. The opinion makes clear that “absconding” and “concealment” have a precise legal meaning tied to intentional evasion of legal process, not mere transience, homelessness, or the practical difficulty of locating a mobile defendant. Plaintiffs have an affirmative duty to investigate and pursue claims with reasonable diligence within the statutory period.
For defendants, the ruling confirms that moving away from a state, changing residence, or becoming difficult to find—absent evidence of deliberate hiding to evade known legal claims—will not trigger tolling. The decision also leaves open (without deciding) the separate question of whether § 25-214 tolling can ever apply to nonresidents, a question that may arise in future cases involving residents of other states.