Slaying, TourBook Link Rejected : Appeal Court Denies Widow’s Claim Against Auto Club
The widow of a lawyer killed in a San Diego motel parking lot is not due damages from the Automobile Club of Southern California just because the club listed the motel in its popular TourBook, a state appeal court has ruled.
The 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego rejected the novel claim by Barbara K. Yanase, saying the club did not have to investigate neighborhood safety when listing and rating hotels and motels in the guides.
“I thought it was a good idea, but you never know,” her lawyer, Paul L. Tepper of Van Nuys, said Monday. “They’re pretty conservative down there.
“Had I proposed this eight years before, I never would have been thrown out,” Tepper said. “Now you’re getting thrown out on darndest things, all because the court system has shifted away from victims’ rights.”
Santa Monica lawyer Fritz B. Hax, who represented the club, said Monday that the court’s decision was just common sense.
“How can somebody protect against the criminal act of a third person?” Hax said. “How on earth is the auto club going to protect against a mugger on somebody else’s property? It was just a wild theory against the club, and I am pleased the court doesn’t make the auto club insure the safety of everybody who reads their TourBook.”
About 2.9 million copies of the California and Nevada TourBook were distributed nationally last year, Clarence M. Garlough, the auto club’s manager of approved accommodations, said Monday in a phone call from Los Angeles.
Different parts of the country have their own directories, Garlough said. The books list and rate hotels and motels and are given free to members of the American Automobile Assn., with which the auto club is affiliated, he said.
The case arose from the Jan. 25, 1984, slaying of George A. Yanase, 52, of Hacienda Heights, an attorney for the state Department of Corporations. The supervising counsel of all Los Angeles attorneys in the department’s enforcement section,
Yanase arrived in San Diego to attend a three-day conference at the Hotel del Coronado.
Yanase registered at what was then called the Royal Lodge motel at 833 Ash St. in downtown San Diego. He was staying there because his daily expense allotment from the state, about $60, was not enough to pay for a room at the Hotel Del, which started at about $100 for the convention, Tepper said.
After attending the first day of the conference, Yanase returned about 10 p.m. to the motel. As he got out of his car in the adjoining parking lot, he was shot in the head in an attempted robbery, police said.
No one has ever been arrested in the killing, Tepper said.
Yanase had picked the motel because he read about it in the 1983 California and Nevada TourBook. Because Yanase relied on the book, and since he was a paid-up member of the auto club, they had a “special relationship,” Tepper contended. That relationship meant that the club owed him the duty of finding out and telling him in the book if the area around a motel was unsafe, the lawyer argued.
San Diego Superior Court Judge Vincent P. Di Figlia rejected that claim. In an opinion filed July 21, the 4th District Court of Appeal did, too.
The purpose of the TourBook, as the guides themselves say, is to provide information about “accommodations,” which the dictionary defined as food and lodging, Justice William L. Todd Jr. said for the court.
Accordingly, the “special relationship, if it exists at all,” was limited to listing and rating “accommodations,” not detailing neighborhood safety, Todd said.
In a 1985 case, a state Court of Appeal ruled that a travel agent who arranges vacation plans must tell a client about “reasonably obtainable” information that might make a difference to the customer, Todd noted. But that case did not apply, since the auto club did not arrange Yanase’s plans, he said.
“I think their argument is really spurious about the book because the book really spurs people on” to think that the club’s field representatives have looked at a lodging “for all reasons, much the same as a travel agent would do,” Tepper said. “I don’t see much distinction between the travel agent analogy and publishing it in a book as a good accommodation.”
Todd’s final point was that the lists and ratings in the book are like an advertisement, and the court was “loath” to create new cases based on “negligently failing to investigate the safety of an advertised product.”
Justices Patricia D. Benke and Charles W. Froehlich Jr. concurred in Todd’s opinion.
“They completely ignored what was a very good argument on the theory they would be extending the law,” Tepper said. “I think that’s wrong. I don’t think that (an appellate court) necessarily has to be an activist court, but it doesn’t have to be a regressive court. And I think this court was being regressive.”
Tepper said he does not plan to appeal. He said he settled separate claims against the motel itself for $200,000.
The automobile club was not a party to the suit.
