Background
On September 19, 2023, Mary Ann Tamayo was walking through a marked crosswalk in the parking lot of a Reseda shopping center, carrying her two-year-old son Zayden Ramirez, when she slipped and fell. Tamayo suffered a comminuted fracture of her left patella, and Zayden hit his head. Security footage showed that several minutes before the fall, an unidentified person exited the Vons grocery store, stopped in the crosswalk, bent down to pick something up, and returned inside. The person appeared to speak briefly with Vons supervisor David Fair, who then walked away. In the four minutes between this event and Tamayo’s fall, 13 vehicles and multiple pedestrians passed over the same area of the crosswalk without apparent incident.
Tamayo, Zayden, and Tamayo’s husband filed suit against The Vons Companies, Inc. and Combined Properties, Inc. (CPI), the shopping center landlord, alleging premises liability, negligence, negligent hiring or supervision, and loss of consortium. The operative lease agreement dating from 1956 designated the parking lot as a “public area” under the landlord’s control and maintenance obligations. CPI had contracted with Common Area Maintenance Services, Inc. (CAM) to clean and maintain the common areas including the parking lot. Vons moved for summary judgment, arguing it did not own, possess, or control the parking lot where Tamayo fell and therefore owed no duty of care.
Plaintiffs opposed the motion, contending that Vons exercised “control” over the parking lot by collecting shopping carts there, designating parking spaces for pickup orders, maintaining a security camera pointed at the area, and having employees who secured the scene after the fall. The trial court granted Vons’s motion, finding that Vons owed no duty of care because it did not exercise control over the parking lot.
The Court’s Holding
The Second District Court of Appeal affirmed summary judgment in favor of Vons. The court began by addressing plaintiffs’ evidentiary argument that the trial court relied on an outdated version of the lease because Vons submitted only the fifth amendment rather than the sixth amendment. The court found this argument unavailing: testimony from CPI’s person most qualified established that the sixth amendment referred back to the 1956 base lease and did not change control of the parking lot, and the base lease itself clearly placed control and maintenance of the parking lot with the landlord.
On the substantive question of duty, the court applied the well-established principle that a defendant cannot be held liable for dangerous conditions on property it does not own, possess, or control. While acknowledging the exception that a party exercising control over property it does not own may owe a duty of care, the court found that Vons’s activities in the parking lot did not rise to the level of “control” required to trigger this duty. Collecting shopping carts constituted managing Vons’s own equipment, not exercising control over the premises. Testimony that employees might clean a spill if they saw one amounted to “minimal, neighborly maintenance” under Alcaraz v. Vece (1997) 14 Cal.4th 1149, not a dramatic assertion of dominion and control. The court distinguished Southland Corp. v. Superior Court (1988) 203 Cal.App.3d 656 and Hassaine v. Club Demonstration Services, Inc. (2022) 77 Cal.App.5th 843, finding neither case analogous to the facts presented.
The court also rejected plaintiffs’ argument that Vons’s post-incident response of placing cones and shopping carts around Tamayo demonstrated control, characterizing this as “simple decency” rather than an assertion of dominion. The court noted that holding otherwise would create poor public policy by discouraging businesses from providing emergency assistance to injured persons.
Key Takeaways
- A commercial tenant’s incidental use of a shopping center parking lot, including shopping cart collection, occasional cleanup, and security camera monitoring, does not establish the level of “control” needed to impose a duty of care for conditions in the common area under California premises liability law.
- Under the lease-based framework, when a lease clearly assigns maintenance and control of common areas to the landlord, a tenant will not be held liable for injuries occurring in those common areas absent evidence of affirmative action to assume responsibility for their safe condition.
- Post-incident emergency assistance by a business’s employees, such as placing barriers around an injured person in a traffic lane, does not constitute evidence of control over the premises for purposes of establishing a duty of care, and courts will not penalize businesses for rendering such aid.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the boundaries of premises liability for commercial tenants operating within multi-tenant shopping centers. Retailers like Vons that lease only their store premises and share common areas with other tenants are not automatically liable for injuries occurring in parking lots and crosswalks maintained by the landlord. The court’s analysis provides a clear framework distinguishing incidental use from the kind of affirmative control that would trigger a duty of care, following the line of authority from Alcaraz through Lopez v. City of Los Angeles and Moses v. Roger-McKeever.
For plaintiffs’ attorneys, the case highlights the importance of establishing concrete evidence of a tenant’s actual control over the area where an injury occurred, rather than relying on the tenant’s general presence or incidental activities. For retailers and their counsel, the decision offers reassurance that standard business operations in shared parking areas, such as cart retrieval and customer assistance, will not by themselves create liability exposure for conditions in areas the retailer does not lease or maintain.