Hargrove v. City of Phila.

671 F.Supp.3d 595

Rodney HARGROVE, et al., Plaintiffs, v. CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, et al., Defendants.

CIVIL ACTION NO. 21-4082

United States District Court, E.D. Pennsylvania

Signed May 3, 2023

Julia R. Ronnebaum, Gregory S. Spizer, VSCP Law, Philadelphia, PA, for Plaintiffs.

Danielle B. Rosenthal, City of Philadelphia Law Department, Philadelphia, PA, for Defendants City of Philadelphia, Warden Michele Farrell, Prison Commissioner Blanche Carney.

Danielle B. Rosenthal, City of Philadelphia Law Department, Philadelphia, PA, John P. Gonzales, Joshua Brownlie, Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman and Goggin, P.C., Philadelphia, PA, for Defendant Warden Nancy Gianetta.

MEMORANDUM

PAPPERT, District Judge

Rodney Michael Hargrove was murdered hours after posting bail and being released, in the middle of the night, from the Curran Fromhold Correctional Facility. Taken by prison officials and left alone at a nearby SEPTA bus stop with no bus scheduled to arrive for roughly five hours, Hargrove was defenseless to individuals in a car who shot him to death after chasing him back on to CFCF property.

As co-administrators of their son's estate, Rodney and Cindy Hargrove sued the City of Philadelphia and Dion Jones, Warden Nancy Gianetta, Warden Michele Farrell and Prison Commissioner Blanche Carney. In their Second Amended Complaint, the Hargroves assert claims pursuant to 42 U.S.C § 1983 and Pennsylvania law. Specifically, Count I alleges Fourteenth Amendment due process claims against all defendants under the state-created danger theory. Count II contends all defendants deprived Hargrove of his constitutional rights by virtue of a special relationship created when Hargrove, as an inmate, was placed in their care. In Count III, Jones, Wardens Gianetta and Farrell and Commissioner Carney allegedly failed to intervene to prevent Hargrove's death and Count IV asserts against the City a municipal liability claim based on the alleged underlying state created danger theory as well as a purported failure to train numerous prison employees. Counts V and VI allege, respectively, state-law wrongful death and survival actions.

The Defendants move to dismiss the federal claims on the merits and the state law claims in the absence of valid claims under federal law. During oral argument on the motion, Plaintiffs withdrew all claims against Dion Jones, all official capacity claims against the remaining individual defendants and Count III in its entirety. After considering the parties' submissions and hearing oral argument, the Court grants Defendants' Motion with respect to Count II and the failure to train claim in Count IV but denies the Motion with respect to all other state and federal claims.

I

Shortly after 1:00 a.m. on March 18, 2021, CFCF prison officials loaded twenty-year-old Rodney Michael Hargrove into a prison van and transported him to a SEPTA bus stop just off prison grounds after Hargrove posted bail. (Second Am. Compl. ¶ 1, ECF 27.) Although Defendants knew the area in which the bus stop was located had seen a substantial increase in homicides, they left Hargrove there, despite also knowing the next bus would not arrive until early morning. (Id. at ¶¶ 67-68, 71.) Despite having a policy of releasing prisoners around the clock, CFCF officials provided no secure area for Hargrove to wait while he arranged for transportation. (Id. at ¶¶ 60-61.)

As Hargrove waited in the dark, individuals in a car began shooting at him in an orchestrated ambush. (Id. at ¶¶ 3-4, 21.) Hargrove ran back to the prison's parking lot, but the parking lot's security booth was unmanned, and there was no one to help him. (Id. at ¶¶ 2, 5, 86-87.) The assailants followed Hargrove onto the prison's grounds, drove past a raised parking security arm and shot Hargrove ten times, killing him. (Id. at ¶¶ 3-10.)

II

To survive dismissal under Rule 12(b)(6), a complaint "must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to 'state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.' " Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 173 L.Ed.2d 868 (2009) (quoting Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 570, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007)). A claim is facially plausible when the pleaded facts "allow[ ] the court to draw the reasonable inference that [a] defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged." Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 678, 129 S.Ct. 1937. Well-pleaded factual allegations are presumed to be true; the Court must "then determine whether they plausibly give rise to an entitlement to relief." Id. at 679, 129 S.Ct. 1937. But this presumption "attaches only to those allegations for which there is sufficient factual matter to render them plausible on their face." Schuchardt v. President of the U.S., 839 F.3d 336, 347 (3d Cir. 2016) (internal quotations and citation omitted). This plausibility determination is a "context-specific task that requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense." Id. (quoting Connelly v. Lane Constr. Corp., 809 F.3d 780, 786-87 (3d Cir. 2016)).

III

To state a claim under Section 1983, Plaintiffs must show that a person acting under the color of state law violated their son's protected constitutional rights. See Morrow v. Balaski, 719 F.3d 160, 165-66 (3d Cir. 2013). The state-created danger theory of liability requires Plaintiffs to plausibly allege four elements: (1) the harm ultimately caused was foreseeable and fairly direct; (2) a state actor acted with a degree of culpability that shocks the conscience; (3) a relationship between the state and Mr. Hargrove existed such that he was a foreseeable victim of the defendants' acts, or a member of a discrete class of persons subjected to the potential harm brought about by the state's actions, as opposed to a member of the public in general; and (4) a state actor affirmatively used his or her authority in a way that created a danger to Mr. Hargrove rendering him more vulnerable to danger than had the state not acted at all. Morrow, 719 F.3d at 177. Defendants correctly do not contest the third element (Hr'g Tr. 5:15, ECF 39) and Plaintiffs have alleged enough facts to establish the other three.

A

The first prong of the state-created danger theory asks whether "the harm ultimately caused was a foreseeable and a fairly direct result of the state's actions." Morse v. Lower Merion Sch. Dist., 132 F.3d 902, 908 (3d Cir. 1997). To allege that it was, Plaintiffs need only "allege an awareness on the part of the state actors that rises to the level of actual knowledge or an awareness of risk that is sufficiently concrete to put the actors on notice of the harm." L.R. v. Sch. Dist. of Phila., 836 F.3d 235, 245 (3d Cir. 2016) (emphasis in original) (quoting Phillips v. Cty. of Allegheny, 515 F.3d 224, 238 (3d Cir. 2008)).

Plaintiffs define the harm they claim to have been foreseeable as "bodily harm" to Mr. Hargrove. (Hr'g Tr. 55:2, ECF 39.) They contend bodily harm was a foreseeable and fairly direct result of the Defendants taking Hargrove to the bus stop and leaving him there, knowing they were leaving him, alone, in a high crime area with no available transportation and no SEPTA buses running for at least five hours. (Second Am. Compl. ¶¶ 11, 66-68; Hr'g Tr. 54: 23-55:2.) Defendants argue that a more specific type of harm, such as a "violent assault"—as opposed to the specific way Mr. Hargrove was killed—must have been foreseeable. (Defs.' Mem. L. Supp. Third Mot. Dismiss 7, ECF 29-1; see also Hr'g Tr. 6:1, 7:4-5.)

Setting aside for a moment that before dying Hargrove was indeed "violently assaulted," foreseeable harm on these alleged facts constitutes "the harm likely to befall" Hargrove, someone left alone to his own devices in a high crime area in the middle of the night. See Kneipp v. Tedder, 95 F.3d 1199, 1208 (3d Cir. 1996) (foreseeable that an intoxicated woman separated by police from her husband and left to walk home alone at night in freezing weather would fall, injure herself and suffer hypothermia).

In L.R. v. School District of Philadelphia, 836 F.3d 235 (3d Cir. 2016), a woman entered an elementary school, refused to produce identification as the purported mother of a kindergartener and yet was allowed by the teacher to take the child, whom she then sexually assaulted. Id. at 836 F.3d at 240. In affirming the District Court's refusal to dismiss the state-created danger claim, the Third Circuit found that "the risk of harm in releasing a five-year-old child to a complete stranger was obvious." Id. at 245. In comparing the case to Kneipp, the court found the risk of harm in both situations to be not only foreseeable, but obviously so. Id.

Here, it was foreseeable that releasing a young child to a stranger could result in harm to the child. This inherent risk is not only a matter of experience as a teacher in charge of a kindergarten classroom, but, as in Kneipp, it is also a matter of common sense. Regardless of which of the many apparent risks of harm—whether kidnapping, child pornography, human trafficking, sexual assault or some other violation—came to pass, [the child's teacher] knew, or should have known, about the risk of his actions.

Id. In both Kneipp and L.R., the official was not required to know the specific harm that would befall each plaintiff. Instead, the harm in each case was foreseeable because the state actor should have been aware of the risks in each situation.

Defendants rely on Mohammed ex rel. Mohammed v. School District of Philadelphia, 355 F. Supp. 2d 779, 784 (E.D. Pa. 2005), aff'd sub nom. Mohammed v. Sch. Dist. of Phila., 196 F. App'x 79 (3d Cir. 2006) for the proposition that the risk of "bodily harm" to Hargrove was too general to be foreseeable. (Defs.' Mem. L. Supp. Third Mot. Dismiss 7, ECF 29-1; Hr'g Tr. 23:23-24:2, ECF 39.) In Mohammed, a student walking up a stairwell found himself behind another student who was about to be attacked by a third party. Id. at 781. As the attacker attempted to punch his intended...