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Mall's 'Minimal Precautions' Spare It Liability for Murder

By Jeff Storey

Since the owners of an Ulster County, NY, mall took at least “minimal precautions to protect tenants from foreseeable harm,” they cannot be held liable for the brutal after-hours murder of the night manager of a restaurant, an upstate appellate court has held. A unanimous panel of the Appellate Division, Third Department, threw out a lawsuit filed by the estate of Sharon Inger against the Hudson Valley Mall near Kingston, NY. The ruling reversed a decision by the trial judge, who found that the duty of the mall to provide adequate security and the foreseeability of the murder presented issues of fact for a jury to ponder.

The appellate court rebuffed arguments that the mall's owners should have upgraded security after an incident on a Saturday afternoon more than a year before the 2006 murder when a man indiscriminately opened fire in a store and the mall's common area with a semi-automatic assault weapon, wounding two people.

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