Auto negligence; Whether the plaintiff could establish a genuine issue of material fact as to whether defendant-Jacisin’s conduct was a proximate cause of plaintiff’s accident & injury; Loweke v. Ann Arbor Ceiling & Partition Co.; Lockridge v. Oakwood Hosp.; Craig v. Oakwood Hosp.; Skinner v. Square D Co.; Babula v. Robertson; Helmus v. Michigan Dep’t of Transp.; Nichols v. Dobler; O’Neal v. St. John Hosp.; Poe v. Detroit; Hastings Mut. Ins. Co. v. State Farm Ins. Co.

The court affirmed the trial court’s grant of summary disposition for the defendants and holding that the plaintiff failed to establish a question of fact whether their alleged negligence was a proximate cause of his injury. The case arose out of a motor vehicle accident. Defendant-Jacisin struck the rear of an SUV. After the collision, Jacisin’s vehicle came to a stop in the center lane of the highway, and the SUV overturned and landed in the center lane just east of Jacisin’s vehicle. “Upon approaching the accident, plaintiff attempted to maneuver around the wreckage, and then back into traffic; his vehicle ultimately collided with the overturned SUV.” He argued the trial court erred when it found that no reasonable jury could find that his accident was part of an uninterrupted chain of events that began with the first accident. Essentially, he maintained that a reasonable jury could find that Jacisin should reasonably have foreseen that he “would weave his way around and between her vehicle and another vehicle disabled by a collision, attempt to merge back into traffic, and clip the second, overturned vehicle with his own as he did so.” Based on the court’s review of the record, including plaintiff’s own testimony, it disagreed. Based on the evidence presented, it held that the trial court was correct. No reasonable factual dispute existed as to “whether Jacisin’s conduct produced plaintiff’s injury as part of continuous sequence that was unbroken by an intervening cause.” The court concluded, as a matter of law, that “plaintiff’s conduct in attempting to maneuver through and around the wreckage, and back into traffic, could not reasonably have been anticipated or foreseen. Regardless of any negligence on Jacisin’s part with regard to the initial accident, plaintiff’s conduct caused an entirely separate and distinct accident, breaking the chain of causation.” The court found that this “was not a ‘chain reaction’ or ‘domino’-type accident, in which the second accident arises naturally out of the first, such that they are properly considered as one accident.” Although the “occurrence of the first accident (and any negligence giving rise to it) was certainly a ‘but for’ cause of the second accident, no reasonable jury could find that it was a ‘proximate’ cause of plaintiff’s injury.”