Plaintiff, Sridhar Jayaraman, was a guest at Caesar’s Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City for a six-night stay. While sitting at the bar with his girlfriend, he had with him a black plastic shopping bag, allegedly containing $120,000 in cash. After he stepped away from the bar, an unknown male later identified as Frederick Exume (“Exume”), approached Plaintiff’s girlfriend, made conversation with her and stole the bag with the money. The issue in the federal court case, Jayaraman v. Boardwalk Regency, LLC., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 173841 (D.N.J. Sept. 28, 2023), was whether the casino breached any duty owed to Plaintiff to protect him from the theft of his money.
The incident happened during the early hours of February 8, 2022, when Plaintiff and his girlfriend arrived at the Toga Bar at the Defendant Boardwalk for a night cap. Plaintiff, while sitting at the bar with his girlfriend had a black plastic shopping bag which allegedly contained $120,000 in cash. He put the bag on a chair at a high-top table across from his girlfriend and stepped away. Plaintiff, however, did not advise his girlfriend to watch the bag as he stepped away.
After he stepped away from the table, Exume approached Plaintiff’s girlfriend to make conversation with her. After conversing with her, he reached under the table, extracting the bag without her detection, and then exited the casino. Upon returning from the restroom, Plaintiff noticed the bag was missing and contacted Boardwalk Security.
Boardwalk Security investigated the incident and identified Exume through video surveillance as the individual that stole the bag. The casino was familiar with Exume because two days previously, Exume was ejected from the casino for public urination and permanently barred by Boardwalk from its premises. However, Boardwalk first learned that Exume was back on its premises only after Plaintiff reported the incident to the casino security and the casino security officers watched the theft on video surveillance.
Two days prior to the incident, Plaintiff had been approached by the casino security and advised not to carry large sums of money on his person in a shopping bag. Security then escorted Plaintiff to his hotel room so that he could store his money in the safe provided in his room.
The defendant casino filed a motion for summary judgment, arguing that it breached no duty owed to Plaintiff and the case should be dismissed. In reviewing the arguments submitted in support of the defendant casino’s motion for summary judgment, the District Court noted that the existence of scope of a duty of care are legal issues to be determined by the court. The Court noted that Boardwalk owed Plaintiff a duty of care to maintain safe premises. That general duty included a duty to protect patrons from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties occurring in their premises.
Boardwalk argued that it did not owe Plaintiff a duty to protect him from Exume’s conduct because it did not know or have reason to know that Exume would steal Plaintiff’s property. Plaintiff, on the other hand, argued that Boardwalk owed Plaintiff a duty to protect him from the foreseeable criminal acts of others, such as Exume’s. He contended that it was foreseeable that a theft of property would occur on the floor of a busy Atlantic City casino. Further, Plaintiff argued that it was reasonably foreseeable that a person permanently banned from a casino – no matter the reason – but later re-entered would commit the crime of theft.
However, the District Court noted that a foreseeability analysis would have to be conducted. The Court noted that, under the law, a defendant business “should reasonably anticipate careless or criminal contact on the part of third persons . . . and may be under a duty to take precautions against it, and to provide a reasonably sufficient number of servants to afford a reasonable protection.”
With this duty in mind, even if the Court assumed that Exume’s theft of the money was foreseeable third-party criminal conduct and, thus, a duty should be imposed, which the Court did not decide, “Plaintiff must still provide some evidence that Boardwalk breached its duty to either; “(1) provide sufficient security services to afford Plaintiff reasonable protection from Exume’s conduct; or (2) take reasonable precautions to protect against Exume’s criminal conduct.” The District Court found that the record contained no evidence to show either theory of a breach.
The Court noted that Plaintiff’s only argument for how Boardwalk breached its duty of care was that it should have enforced its ban of Exume from the premises. However, the District Court found no evidence suggesting that Boardwalk failed to provide security services, or it otherwise failed to take reasonable measures to protect Plaintiff from Exume’s conduct.
The Court noted that the casino security had warned Plaintiff to not carry large sums of money on his person in a shopping bag. Further, that security escorted Plaintiff to his hotel room to store the money in a safe. Thus, based upon this evidence, Boardwalk did maintain security services that were cognizant of the risk to a patron carrying large sums of money in an unsecured bag and took precautions against future thefts by advising Plaintiff to keep his winnings in a safe provided by Boardwalk.
Further, the Court found that Plaintiff did not provide evidence that Boardwalk failed to take reasonable precautions to enforce its ban of Exume. Boardwalk was not under a duty to stop any and all criminal conduct from occurring. Rather, a business owner only had a duty to take precautions against criminal conduct that was foreseeable to the business owner.
Here, Plaintiff provided no evidence that Boardwalk or its security services failed to take reasonable steps to prevent Exume from entering the premises or that it failed to take reasonable steps to prevent the theft from occurring. Plaintiff offered no suggestions for what more Boardwalk could have done to ensure Exume did not enter the premises after being banned. Further, the Court noted that there was no evidence that Boardwalk knew Exume was on the premises but failed to remove him or that Exume did anything that reasonably should have apprised Boardwalk’s security of Exume’s presence.
Thus, the District Court found that there was no genuine dispute of material fact as to a breach in this matter because of Plaintiff’s failure to provide evidence to suggest Boardwalk breached its alleged duty owed to Plaintiff. Thus, the Court found that even if Boardwalk owed Plaintiff a duty, its motion for summary judgment must be granted because there was no evidence to establish Boardwalk breached that duty. Therefore, the Plaintiff’s complaint was dismissed.
