No causation in 9-1-1 case

April 3, 2017

Plaintiffs alleged that a terrible crime would have been averted with a faster response to a 9-1-1 call. The Fifth Circuit, applying City of Dallas v. Sanchez, 494 S.W.3d 722 (Tex. 2016), found a lack of proximate cause (and thus, immunity applied) because “plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged that any of the intervening parties would have acted differently,” including the call center operator and emergency personnel on the scene. The allegations on the general subject of response time were too speculative to satisfy Twombly (footnote 4)And “‘even if the brief delay in relaying Cook’s location ‘contributed to circumstances that delayed potentially life-saving assistance, the [delay] was too attenuated from the cause of [Cook’s] death . . . to be a proximate cause.” Cook v. City of Dallas, No. 16-10105 (March 29, 2017).

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