Bilotta v. Media, Middleton, Aston & Chester Electric Railway Co.

Citations

• 220 Pa. 542
• 70 A. 123
• 1908 Pa. LEXIS 812

Syllabus

<p>Negligence — Street railways — Notice of danger — Individual peculiarity of plaintiff.</p> <p>Where the inability of a party injured owing to some individual peculiarity of his, unknown to the defendant, to understand what to the ordinary person would be a sufficient warning, is the. immediate and proximate cause of his injury, the accident is to be referred to the party's misfortune, and not to the negligence of the defendant simply because of failure to give effectual warning.</p> <p>In an action against a street railway company to recover damages for personal injuries it appeared that before the plaintiff was injured a tree had fallen across defendant’s tracks, and had dragged down with it a number of telephone wires. These wires had become tangled in the branches, and some of them had become charged from contact with the trolley wires. Cars were run up from both directions to the tree, and the passengers were transferred from one car to the other so as to make the continuous journey. The plaintiff, an Italian, who could not speak English, was warned by»the motorman on the car on which he was a passenger to remain seated in the car until the other car had arrived, and that it was dangerous to cross over. Plaintiff left the car and started to cross over, when he was warned by the defendant’s superintendent, both by words and movements, to stay back. He disregarded the warning and came in contact with a wire and was injured. Defendant presented this point: “ There was no obligation on the part of the defendant company to warn the plaintiff in Italian, and if the jury find that the warning was such as to indicate danger ahead to any man of ordinary intelligence, plaintiff cannot recover.” This point was answered as follows: “We will say that if from any motion or act of the defendant, he, the plaintiff, understood the warning, then he cannot recover. But we cannot say that if they warned him in a language that he did not understand, and that he did not heed it, t