A jogger who was intentionally run over by a high-school student cannot sue school officials for turning a blind eye after the student expressed a desire to do “horrible things” with a vehicle, the Montana Supreme Court has ruled.

Daniel Robbins

Daniel Robbins, then 16, nearly killed Patty Emanuel in May 2003 when he slammed his SUV into her as she was jogging near C.M. Russell High School in Great Falls, Mont. He had told his passenger that he wanted to run her over and then have sex with her corpse.

In suing the Great Falls School District for negligence, Emanuel said school officials failed to take appropriate action after Robbins expressed gruesome thoughts in a January 2002 typing assignment –- including a New Year's resoluton to “Get a drivers license, so I can do those horrible things people like to read about in the paper.”

“Daniel foretold, in writing, that he was resolved to commit a horrible act with a motor vehicle,” Emanuel, who suffered six fractured vertebrae, four fractures in her pelvis, a collapsed lung, three broken ribs and other injuries, said in an appellate brief.

But the Supreme Court found the district could not have foreseen he “would deliberately run over a pedestrian, after school hours, off school grounds, nearly seventeen months after the disturbing New Year’s Resolution list was brought to its attention.”

The list “did not contain any specific threats,” the court said in affirming a trial judge who summarily dismissed the case, and “several of the resolutions (e.g.: 'Kill the tooth fairy.') were sufficiently ridiculous or random so as to support Robbins’s explanation that the list was created as a misguided attempt at black humor.”

The decision did not discuss the public policy implications of the case. Emanuel argued that a school district should not “enjoy[ ] complete exemption from tort liability regardless of how negligently and dangerously it acts in counseling, evaluating and monitoring students and in designing and implementing a threat assessment and violence prevention plan.”

Robbins also resolved in his list to “Taste human flesh” and “Shoot some one on a caping [sic] trip.” According to Emanuel, the Russell High principal told his parents that the ninth-grader was a normal, typical student and no one from the district referred him to a “school counselor, school psychologist, or any outside mental health professionals.”

The district said in a brief that Robbins only wrote “some weird things” in his list and that it was under no duty “to implement a plan that would protect a jogger from a student’s conduct off school grounds at night.”

In post-Columbine America, school officials have also been sued when they do take action against students who express violent thoughts. But Emanuel seemed to have a reasonable argument that Russell High should at least have provided Robbins with “responsive services” and kept him under some kind of increased supervision.

“If the District had been monitoring Daniel,” she said,

they would have discovered: Daniel was involved in a violent video gaming gang called the Apocalypse Knights; Daniel drew depictions of the gang's symbol, and satanic images on his arms, along with drawings of pentagrams, guns, knives and people dying, and had written the phrases "death rocks" and "the end of the world is near" on his arms; Daniel had drawn a depiction of his friend Pablo Jara's head being blown off while the two were in a dispute; Daniel had been "really different this year" and had been more "goth"; Daniel had been wearing realistic looking vampire teeth to school; Daniel had discussed getting a gun and did in fact have one in his possession prior to the attack on Patty; Daniel was committing crimes and stealing; Daniel had been discussing robbing a bank and how to get away with the robbery and murder.

Robbins is serving 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempted deliberate homicide. Referring to the resolutions list, the judge who sentenced him said, "The defendant made up his mind to run [Emanuel] down well in advance.”

By Matthew Heller
6/1/09