Starr v. Southern Railway Co.
Starr v. Southern Railway Co.
Opinion of the Court
Starr sped the Southern Railway Company for an injury which occurred in the State of Alabama. The court sustained a general demurrer to the petition, and the writ of error challenges the correctness of this judgment. The petition, in brief, makes the following case: The plaintiff was engaged in driving a dray in the town of Gadsden, Ala. His family lived at Cedar Bluff, some fifteen miles from Gadsden. On every Saturday afternoon his son, who was a brakeman on a freight train of the defendant, would bring his clean clothes to him from his home at Cedar Bluff, and take his soiled clothes back to his home on Monday morning. The plaintiff would meet the trains on Saturday afternoons at Gadsden and get his clothes from the brakeman. This was not an occasional happening, but was uninterrupted and continuous for eighteen months; and he did this with the consent and at the invitation of the brakeman, and this habit was well known to the defendant, or could have been known by the exercise of any care. On the day the plaintiff was injured he started to get up on the freight train of the defendant company, to get his clothes from the brakeman as usual, and, just as he mounted the car to get up on it, the train suddenly pulled off. At the time he began to mount the car, it was forty feet from a box-car on a side-track, which had been left within four inches of the cars on the main line, and, before he got to the top of the car, his body came in contact with the box-car on the side-track, and his arm was mashed off and his leg broken. He did not know of the car standing on the side-track, until after his injury. The engineer and the fireman had just passed with their engine by the car on the
Whether the allegations of the petition make the plaintiff a licensee or a trespasser, they sufficiently show a cause of action to withstand a general demurrer. The distinction between a licensee and a trespasser, and the correlative liability of the railroad company, is so clearly and fully drawn by this court in the case of Mandeville Mills v. Dale, 2 Ga. App. 607 (58 S. E. 1060), and citations therein, that nothing can be added on the subject. Conceding the contention of the defendant in error, that the plaintiff was only a trespasser, and that his perilous situation was brought about by his own negligence, yet, according to the allegations of the petition, his presence and perilous position were known to the employees of the railroad company in charge of the train, in time to stop the train without hurting him; and it was therefore a question for the jury to determine if the injury to him could not have
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.