Wylie v. APT Foundation, Inc.

Citations

• 226 Conn. App. 267

Syllabus

The plaintiff, acting in her capacity as the administratrix of the estate of the decedent, appealed to this court from the judgment rendered by the trial court for the defendant following the granting of the defendant's motion to strike her operative complaint. The defendant operated a center for drug rehabilitation and provided methadone treatment for opioid dependent patients at its premises. As the decedent began to walk up the public sidewalk toward the entrance to the defendant's driveway, an individual approached and fatally stabbed the decedent directly in front of the defendant's premises. The plaintiff brought an action for wrongful death, setting forth claims of, inter alia, public nuisance. The plaintiff alleged, inter alia, that local residents had devel- oped concerns regarding loitering, drug use, crime, prostitution, and public defecation on private property in the immediate vicinity sur- rounding the defendant's premises, that the defendant created a magnet for criminal activity in the immediate vicinity surrounding the premises by providing a methadone treatment program without also providing for proper security, and that over the nine month period immediately preceding the decedent's death the police responded to forty-two com- plaints of criminal activity in the area. In its motion to strike, the defen- dant noted that the complaint alleged that the stabbing occurred on the public sidewalk that the defendant neither owned nor controlled and claimed that the allegations set forth in the operative complaint did not support the claims that the operation of a methadone clinic at the premises had a natural tendency to create danger and to inflict injury on public property or that the defendant's use of its property was unrea- sonable or unlawful. Held that the trial court properly granted the defen- dant's motion to strike the public nuisance claim as alleged in the plaintiff's operative complaint: this court concluded that the defendant's premises did