Wassell v. Adams

865 F.2d 849 (7th Cir. 1989)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

P rented a motel room from the D in a high crime area near a Naval Base. P was there to get married to her boyfriend, Michael and to find a place to live. The motel was in a bad neighborhood full of crime, and although women were warned by D of the crime problems, P was not. P eventually got a knock at the door of her room. She went to the door and looked through the peephole but saw no one. Next to the door was a pane of clear glass. She did not look through it. The door had two locks plus a chain. She unlocked the door and opened it all the way thinking that it was her boyfriend. It was not. It was a respectably dressed black man whom P had never seen before. He asked for 'Cindy' and then asked for a glass of water. She went to the bathroom, which was at the other end of the room, about 25 feet from the door to fetch the glass of water. When she came out of the bathroom, the man was sitting at the table in the room. He took the water but said it wasn't cold enough. He also said he had no money, and P remarked that she had $20 in her car. The man went into the bathroom to get a colder glass of water. Susan began to get nervous. She was standing between the bathroom and the door of her room. She hid her purse, which contained her car keys and $800 in cash that Michael had given her. There was no telephone in the room. There was an alarm attached to the television set, which would be activated if someone tried to remove the set, but she had not been told and did not know about the alarm, although a notice of the alarm was posted by the set. The parking lot on which the motel rooms opened was brightly lit by floodlights. The man emerged from the bathroom -- naked from the waist down. P fled from the room, and beat on the door of the adjacent room. There was no response. The man ran after her and grabbed her. She screamed, but no one appeared. The motel had no security guard; D lived in a basement apartment at the other end of the motel and did not hear her screams. P was dragged back to her room. There he gagged her and raped her at least twice (once anally). Eventually, P convinced the rapist that she liked him, and eventually, she escaped. The rapist was never prosecuted; a suspect was caught, but P was too upset to identify him. There had been a rape and a prior robbery some two years before at D’s hotel. These were the only serious crimes committed during the seven years that the D owned the motel. P sued D. P got the verdict for $850,000, but the jury also found that P had been negligent too and that her negligence was 97% vs. the 3% of D. P got $25,500 in damages. P appealed. P argues that the defendants were willful and wanton, which, she says, would make her negligence as irrelevant under a regime of comparative negligence as it would be in a jurisdiction in which contributory negligence was still a complete defense.