California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from Bigbee v. Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, 131 Cal.App.3d 999, 183 Cal.Rptr. 535 (Cal. App. 1982):
In the case at bench it is clear as a matter of law that defendants' negligence, if any, was not the proximate cause of plaintiff's injuries because the criminal conduct of the drunken driver who lost control and drove her car off the roadway at a high rate of speed crashing it into the telephone booth constituted an intervening and superseding cause. Furthermore, the nature of the accident was so unusual that it was not reasonably foreseeable that this type of injury would be sustained by a person using a telephone booth. " 'Liability cannot be predicated on a prior and remote cause which merely furnishes the condition or occasion for an injury resulting from an intervening unrelated and efficient cause, even though the injury would not have resulted but for such condition or occasion; ...' (65 C.J.S., Negligence, 111(4).)" (Schrimscher v. Bryson, supra, 58 Cal.App.3d 660, 664.)
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