Kines v. Ford Motor Co.

558 F.Supp.3d 614

Debra KINES and Steven Kines, Plaintiffs,

v.FORD MOTOR COMPANY, Defendant.

No. 1:19-cv-01054-JDB-jay

United States District Court, W.D. Tennessee, Eastern Division.

Signed July 15, 2021

Filed August 31, 2021

Geoffrey Gaia, Rachel Grace Gelfand, Danny Parish, Erin Bradley, Jessica L. Turner, Patrick M. Ardis, Wolff Ardis, P.C., Memphis, TN, for Plaintiffs.

George S. Scoville, III, Lewis, Thomason, King, Krieg & Waldrop, P.C., Nashville, TN, Ryan Nelson Clark, John Randolph Bibb, Jr., Lewis, Thomason, King, Krieg & Waldrop, P.C., Memphis, TN, Sherry Ann Rozell, McAfee & Taft, P.C., Springfield, MO, for Defendant.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

J. DANIEL BREEN, UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

INTRODUCTION AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

This products liability action was initially brought in the Circuit Court of Hardin County, Tennessee, by the Plaintiffs, Debra and Steven Kines, against Ford Motor Company ("Ford") and Long-Lewis Ford Lincoln-Mercury of Corinth, Inc. ("Long-Lewis"). (Docket Entry ("D.E.") 1-2.) The suit arose from injuries sustained by Ms. Kines while cleaning the interior of her 2018 Ford Explorer (the "Explorer"), a vehicle designed and assembled in part by Ford and purchased by Plaintiffs from Long-Lewis. The matter was removed to this Court on March 21, 2019, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a).¹ (D.E. 1.) On February 26, 2020, the Court granted the joint motion of Plaintiffs and Long-Lewis to dismiss all claims against the latter without prejudice. (D.E. 96-97.) On the same day, Plaintiffs amended their complaint, alleging strict products liability and failure to warn against Ford (sometimes referred to herein as the "Defendant"). (D.E. 99.) The Court conducted a bench trial on November 2 and 3, 2020. (D.E. 157-58.) At the commencement of its proof, Defendant moved for dismissal with prejudice of the failure-to-warn claim, to which Plaintiffs did not object. The Court orally granted the motion. Upon careful consideration of the credible witness testimony, exhibits offered at trial, transcripts of the proceedings, the proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law submitted by the parties, and the applicable law, the Court, in accordance with Rule 52(a)(1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,² makes the following findings of fact and conclusions of law with respect to the remaining strict products liability claim.

FINDINGS OF FACT

At the time of her injury, Ms. Kines lived with her husband in Counce, Tennessee, a small community near the Mississippi border. She was a trained professional musician who had taught voice and piano for more than twenty years, directed a church music program where she played piano, and had her own jazz band.

Plaintiffs purchased the Explorer from Long-Lewis, a Ford dealership located in nearby Corinth, Mississippi, on March 3, 2018. The vehicle was equipped with two third-row seats in a tumble-to-fold-flat design that allowed them to be manually lowered from an upright passenger mode to a position providing a flat, level cargo—or "load"—floor when the seats were stowed. They had previously owned 2003 and 2008 model Explorers, both of which also had third-row seats that folded flat into a cargo position. At the time of purchase, the third-row seats were in the cargo mode and the load floor was level.

Ms. Kines, who drove the Explorer most of the time, reviewed its owner's manual.

The salesperson at Long-Lewis demonstrated how to maneuver the third-row seats between the passenger and cargo modes and a video on how to adjust the seats between the two modes was available on Ford's website.

On August 8, 2018, after Plaintiffs had accumulated some 11,268 miles on the Explorer and the vehicle was still under warranty, Ms. Kines had arrived home from returning her two young granddaughters to their father, who lived in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and was preparing to fly to San Antonio, Texas, to join her husband the next day. During their several-days-long visit at their grandparents’ home, the girls had ridden in the Explorer and at least one had been seated in the third row.

Ms. Kines was vacuuming the interior of the vehicle and folded the third-row seats into the cargo position in order to clean the cargo space. There were no foreign objects in the vehicle that would have interfered with the action of folding and unfolding the third-row seats at that time. After she folded the third-row passenger side seat, Ms. Kines noticed the load floor had "fallen" on that side. (D.E. 160 at PageID 1899.) This had occurred once or twice previously when she folded the seats into the cargo mode in order to accommodate her musical equipment.

Plaintiffs described Ms. Kines, the daughter and granddaughter of carpenters and contractors and the stepdaughter of an engineer, as the type of person who tries to fix most things herself. Although she did not know what caused the load floor to droop, she found on the previous occasions that she could level it by "rotat[ing]" the third-row seat until it made a "snap[ping]" sound and "pop[ped] back into place." (Id. at PageID 1900, 1938.) The load floor would then be flat. She explained this "rotation" as cycling the third-row seat from the flat position to upright and back a few times from a standing position at the rear opening of the vehicle. Because the problem resolved itself in that manner previously, she had never looked under the load floor.

On August 8, 2018, however, cycling the seat between the upright and cargo modes several times did not remedy the droop in the passenger side load floor. Ms. Kines then opened the rear passenger door, moved the second-row seat forward, stepped with her right foot into the footwell between the second-and third-row seats, and lifted the load floor. She discovered a metal bracket, detached from the load floor and lying flat against the floor of the vehicle. She stated she could observe a hinge on the bracket.

She raised the load floor higher to get a better look at its underside and noticed plastic hook channels into which pins located on the bracket appeared to be supposed to fit. She identified the problem with the load floor as its disconnection from the bracket, relating in a video prepared for her counsel and introduced at trial that "all I [had] to do is pick up this piece of metal[ and] pop it into those hinges."³ (Id. at PageID 1951.) "[I]t looked like an easy fix" to her. (Id. at PageID 1903.)

Ms. Kines reached in with her right hand and pushed the bracket upward to snap it into the hook channels. In doing so, she could feel "some" resistance, but "[n]ot much." (Id. at PageID 1952.) As soon as she thought she had the pins reattached, the bracket "let go." (Id. at PageID 1951.) The mechanism, on which her hand was still resting, quickly "snapped back." (Id. at PageID 1951, 1953.) She described the spring's force in her trial testimony as being "so strong." (Id. at PageID 1953.) At the time, she knew the fifth digit on her right hand had been injured but "did not know how it happened." (Id. at PageID 1904.)

At trial, Ms. Kines described her injury thusly: "The metal cut the tip of [her] finger at an angle, through the fingernail and all through the bone, and [her] finger was hanging off. And [she] was holding it to keep it from falling in the grass." (Id. at PageID 1905.) There was "[l]ots of blood." (Id. ) Ms. Kines, who was home alone, wrapped the finger in medical tape and was about to attempt to drive herself to the hospital when she saw her neighbor, a nurse, arrive home from work. The neighbor drove her to a hospital emergency room in Corinth and she underwent hand surgery, performed by Dr. James Long, the following day.

On September 18, 2018, Mr. Kines took the vehicle to Long-Lewis’ Quick Lane for a routine oil and filter change. He mentioned his wife's injury and was told he would need to take the vehicle to the dealership to have the Explorer checked out. Even though the dealership was next door, he did not do so.

On November 2, 2018, Ms. Kines drove the Explorer to Long-Lewis herself, advised the service manager of her injury, showed him her medical bills, and told him she wanted to file a report. He "popped" the bracket back into place. (Id. at PageID 1916.) She drove the vehicle home, assuming the problem was resolved. The service manager did not tell her what to do if the bracket disengaged again, which it did. This time, Ms. Kines did not return it to the dealership but reattached the bracket herself using a crowbar and a mop handle, unwilling to risk a second injury.

Ms. Kines’ post-surgery follow-up care was performed by Dr. John Barton Williams at Ortho Memphis. Memphis, Tennessee, where Ortho Memphis was located, was just under two hours from Counce. She saw Dr. Williams on two occasions—in October and December 2018—after which he released her. His notes from her final visit on December 17, 2018, indicated that "things ha[d] totally healed at [that] point," that she did not need additional therapy at that time, and that she was "doing very well for a significant injury." (Id. at PageID 1973.) He planned to see her on an "as-needed basis." (Id. ) She did not return to Dr. Williams.

She had begun physical therapy at Ortho Memphis in October 2018 but stopped because of the distance of the clinic from her home and the pain associated with the therapy tasks. She participated in physical therapy on a total of four occasions, the first two occurring in October and November 2018. Ms. Kines then traveled to Montana to visit her son and did not return to physical therapy for nearly a month. Her final physical therapy session was in December 2018.

The bracket was removed from the Explorer on October 10, 2018, by Donald Robert Phillips, a mechanical engineer retained as an expert by Plaintiffs’ counsel. Ms. Kines left the third-row passenger seat in cargo mode until she purchased a replacement bracket on November 2, 2018, from Long-Lewis. Plaintiffs replaced both load floors on February 14, 2020, at a...