In a matter of first impression, the Indiana Court of Appeals recently reviewed the applicability of Indiana’s Bystander Rule for emotional distress damages arising from a home gas explosion and fire. In Ceres Sols. Coop., Inc. v. Estate of Bradley, Ceres Solutions Cooperative, Inc. (“Ceres”) negligently failed to check for gas leaks in refilling a propane tank at Kenneth Bradley’s (“Bradley”) home. Bradley lived in the home with his wife Kathy and son Eric. In the early morning after the refill, while Bradley was at work, Eric turned on a lamp next to his bed, which caused an explosion, surrounding him in a ball of fire. Part of the home’s roof collapsed and there was rubble and fires around the home. Eric was severely burned but escaped. Kathy was killed.
Bradley filed a lawsuit against Ceres which included a claim for his emotional distress. Typically, to recover emotional distress damages in Indiana, under Indiana’s Modified Impact Rule, a claimant must suffer a direct impact by another’s negligence and by virtue of that involvement suffer an emotional trauma serious in nature and of a kind and extent normally expected to occur in a reasonable person. However, Indiana has also adopted the Bystander Rule, which is an exception to the Modified Impact Rule, that allows emotional distress damages when a claimant establishes a direct involvement with the incident. To recover emotional distress damages under Indiana’s Bystander Rule, courts consider as a matter of law three factors: (1) the severity of the victim’s injury (serious injury or death to a victim), (2) the relationship of the plaintiff to the victim (a close familial relationship with the victim), and (3) the circumstances surrounding the claimant’s discovery of the victim’s injury (direct observation of the incident or its immediate “gruesome aftermath,” rather than learning of the incident by indirect means). To satisfy the third factor, (A) the bystander claimant must come on the scene at or immediately following the incident, (B) the claimant must not have been informed of the incident before coming on the scene, and (C) the scene and victim must be in essentially the same condition as immediately following the incident.
Here, about three hours after the explosion, Bradley was driving home from work when he came upon a roadblock, around three-quarters of a mile from his home. He could see flames coming from his home. He asked the lady at the roadblock, who was a local volunteer firefighter’s wife, whether his wife made it out of the house, but she did not know, she had no radio, and she had not been provided any information as to what was occurring. Bradley drove to his home and saw “big and steady” flames. Bradley saw his son Eric on a gurney with a blanket on and visible burn injuries to his face. Eric told Bradley he did not know where Kathy was, and although firefighters continued to search for her, the flames got bigger every time they dug, so they had to wait. The firefighters eventually found Kathy and made Bradley leave the scene so they could remove her.