Article by Charles F. Holmgren

By: Charles F. Holmgren, Esq. and Betsy G. Ramos, Esq.

To file a personal injury claim against a public entity, the Tort Claims Act requires that a plaintiff must file a notice of tort claim with that entity within 90 days of his/her accident. If no tort claim notice is filed within that time period, a claimant has up to one year to seek leave with the court to file a late notice of tort claim. However, the claimant must establish that extraordinary circumstances prevented his or her filing of this notice within that 90 day time period – which is a difficult standard to meet. In a case handled by our firm before the New Jersey Appellate Division, Silver v. Wang, 2017 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 441 (App. Div. Feb. 24, 2017), the Appellate Division ruled that even the death of the claimant is not an impediment to the court’s refusal to find extraordinary circumstances exist to relax the strict requirement of a timely filed notice of tort claim.

The accident in the Silver case occurred on April 11, 2014. There, Plaintiffs’ decedent Jennifer Peplinski died when her car swerved off of Route 130 in North Brunswick, New Jersey and struck a utility pole off the side of the road. On January 21, 2015, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office and the North Brunswick Police Department issued an investigation report of the accident showing that Mrs. Peplinski’s car was struck by another vehicle that caused her to lose control of her car and strike the pole. On receipt of this report, Mrs. Peplinski’s adult children, the plaintiffs, met with an attorney on January 31, 2015, took steps to create an estate for her, and filed a motion for leave to file a late notice of tort claim. They argued that only when they received the report, well after the ninety day notice period, did they learn that that defendants Township of North Brunswick and the State of New Jersey could have been involved in their mother’s accident and, during that ninety day period, no estate existed in order to file a claim on their mother’s behalf.

The defendants opposed the motion. The defendants argued that the claimant learned nothing new from the investigation report pertaining to North Brunswick or the State; that, at the time of her death or soon thereafter, the plaintiffs knew Mrs. Peplinski died from striking a pole off of Route 130 in North Brunswick and, on these facts alone, they had sufficient information to file a timely tort claims notice and that the plaintiffs’ failure to do so alone fails to satisfy the extraordinary circumstances requirement of pertinent Tort Claims Act section, N.J.S.A. 59:8-9. Furthermore, the defendants argued that the Tort Claims Act makes clear that an estate did not need to exist in order for the plaintiffs to file a notice on the decedent’s behalf.

The trial court was unpersuaded by the defendants’ position and found that the totality of the circumstances showed that only when they received the report did the plaintiffs learn the facts of the accident and, based on those proofs, met the threshold intended by the Act. Furthermore, the court found that without an estate to file the claims notice, there would be no entity chargeable with the failure to file a notice. Thus, the trial court permitted the plaintiffs to file a late notice of tort claim. Both defendants appealed this order.

On appeal, the Appellate Division reversed. The two issues before the appellate court were whether the trial court abused its discretion in finding the plaintiffs demonstrated extraordinary circumstances to relax the ninety day statutory period and whether the plaintiffs could have filed a notice of tort claim on behalf of the estate before the estate was created.

The Appellate Division found that the plaintiffs never indicated what new information they learned from the investigation report that prompted them to pursue the claim on their mother’s behalf against North Brunswick and the State. The Court found that the plaintiffs only came to an understanding they had a claim against the defendants after they visited an attorney who then informed them that the utility pole, which may be owned by either defendant, could be too close to the road and thereby could have contributed to the decedent’s death. As there was nothing in the investigation report that set forth the proximity of the utility pole to the roadway, the investigation report did not provide them with any information they did not already have in their possession immediately after their mother’s death. Because the failure to seek an attorney or ignorance of the filing period fails to satisfy the extraordinary circumstances threshold, the Court determined the plaintiffs could not meet the strict standards required by the Act. Thus, the Appellate Division found the trial court erred in its decision to grant the plaintiffs’ motion to file a late tort claims notice.

Furthermore, the Tort Claims Act specifically states that a notice “shall be signed by the claimant or by some person on his behalf.” Indeed, no case interpreting the Act supported the plaintiffs’ claim that only an estate can file a notice. Hence, the Appellate Division also ruled that an estate need not be created before a notice of tort claims is filed on a decedent’s behalf.