Howard W. Hemmings and Suzette Hemmings rented a second floor apartment in Pelham Wood, a 400 unit apartment building in Baltimore County.  Their apartment was equipped with deadbolt locks and bars which secured the sliding glass doors of the apartment balconies.

On June 13, 1998, Mr. Hemmings was murdered by an unidentified intruder who forcibly entered the apartment through the sliding glass door on the second floor balcony.  Entry was forced.  The lock on the sliding glass door was damaged. 

Suzette filed suit on behalf of herself and on behalf of her late husband’s estate against Pelham Wood Limited Liability Limited Partnership (“Pelham Wood”)  and RLA Management, L.L.P. (“RLA”) in the Circuit Court for Baltimore County, alleging that the defendants were negligent.  The lower court granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of both defendants and Suzette appealed to the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland.

 Although the evidence before the lower court indicated that Pelham Wood and RLA had received numerous complaints from tenants about safety of the premises, and a security light that had been broken, neither Suzette nor her late husband had ever voiced any complaint about security of their apartment.  The complaints from other tenants concerned robbery, threats at gun point, questionable visitors, vandalism, theft, suspicious activities and other complaints.  In granting summary judgment, the lower court found that there was insufficient evidence to impose a duty on Pelham Wood and RLA.

 The basic elements for a cause of action in negligence are (a) a duty or obligation on the part of the defendant to protect the plaintiff from injury, (b) a failure to discharge that duty, and (c) actual loss or injury to the plaintiff resulting from that failure.

The Court of Special Appeals distinguished between a landlord’s duties to protect tenants from criminal acts committed in common areas within the landlord’s control and those imposed upon a landlord with regard to those areas under the tenant’s control. Generally, a landlord must exercise ordinary care and diligence in maintaining common areas in a reasonably safe condition.  The common thread running through the Maryland cases which have held a landlord liable is the ability of the landlord to exercise control over the area or the condition at issue.

However, in this case the injury occurred inside the apartment, an area over which the tenant had control, not the landlord.  Since most of the Maryland cases involved injuries occurring in the common areas of apartment complexes, the Court looked to cases in other jurisdictions.  The Court found particularly persuasive a South Carolina case where “the deceased was murdered in her apartment by an unknown intruder who entered the apartment by prying open the patio sliding glass door.”  In Cramer v. Balcor Property Management, Inc.,  441 S.E. 2d 317 (S.C. 1994), the court stated: 

 “Tenants in a huge apartment complex, or a tenant on the second floor of a house converted to an apartment, do not live where the world is invited to come.  Absent agreement, the landlord cannot be expected to protect them against the wiles of felony any more than the society can always protect them upon the common streets and highways leading to their residence or indeed in their home itself.” 

The South Carolina court held in that case that there was no duty on the part of landlords to provide protection to tenants against criminal activity. 

In affirming the summary judgments, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals stated:

“We deem the analysis employed by the South Carolina court to be persuasive. In the case at hand, the intruder entered the Hemmings’s apartment via a sliding glass door, which had been equipped with a ‘Charlie bar’ and deadbolt locks, pursuant to appellees’ policy.  The legal responsibility for the upkeep of those security devices and the burden of preventing the entrance of intruders necessarily fell on the tenants of Pelham Wood, rather than appellees.  If at any time, the tenants had reported that the ‘Charlie bar’ or the locks were in disrepair, the duty would have been on appellees to fix them. [However,] . . . no such complaint was reported.  In the absence of any such complaint, because the criminal act in the case sub judice occurred inside of the demised premises – an area over which the landlord was no longer able to exert control – we hold that [the landlord and manager] did not owe [tenants] a duty. “

The Court also held that from the facts presented, there could be no showing that the appellees’ failure to maintain the common areas was the proximate cause of the murder.  Accordingly, the grant of summary judgment was held to be proper.

Suzette Hemmings v. Pelham Wood Limited Liability Limited Partnership, et al., Court of Special Appeals of Maryland, No. 1189, September Term 2001, filed May 6, 2002.

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