The underlying accident happened on April 13, 2021, on Interstate 25 in a remote stretch of New Mexico. Richard Fralick's newly acquired used Subaru broke down around 9:30 p.m. and he guided it into an emergency crossover between the northbound and southbound lanes. Fralick told his elderly passenger, William Westuk, to stay in the car because Westuk had difficulty walking without a cane or other mobility aid. After roughly three hours, and without Fralick's knowledge or consent, Westuk left the vehicle, crossed the median, and made his way into the far left southbound lane. At approximately 12:38 a.m., Stephanie Mazur, driving a 1999 Toyota Land Cruiser southbound with Julia Wunder as a passenger, came upon Westuk in the travel lane and swerved to avoid him, causing the Land Cruiser to roll over several times and injure both women.
Mazur and Wunder sought coverage under the uninsured motorist provision of the State Farm policy insuring the Land Cruiser, which was owned by Wunder's parents. They argued that their injuries stemmed from Fralick's negligent maintenance and operation of his uninsured Subaru, which set the chain of events in motion. State Farm denied the claims, and the district court granted summary judgment in State Farm's favor under the Colorado Supreme Court's framework in State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Kastner, 77 P.3d 1256 (Colo. 2003).
The Tenth Circuit, in an opinion authored by Circuit Judge Carolyn B. McHugh and joined by Circuit Judges Phillips and Rossman, affirmed on the causation prong of Kastner without resolving the threshold "use" question. Kastner requires a claimant to show both that the uninsured vehicle was being used as a mode of transportation and that the injury was directly related or inextricably linked to that use, with no independent significant act interrupting the causal chain. The panel assumed without deciding that Fralick's operation of the Subaru qualified as a covered "use," then held that the causation prong was not satisfied.
The court held that Westuk's choice to leave the vehicle and walk to the southbound lanes — taken against Fralick's advice and without his knowledge — constituted an independent significant act by a third party that severed any direct relationship between Fralick's use of the Subaru and the plaintiffs' injuries. The court noted that when the Subaru broke down, Fralick had guided it to a place of safety in the crossover, but assumed without deciding whether that action alone broke the causal chain, resting its holding instead on Westuk's departure. The court further noted that whatever mishap caused Westuk to end up in the travel lane itself was an additional intervening event.
The panel rejected the plaintiffs' argument that foreseeability should govern the causation analysis. The court held that Kastner confines foreseeability to its first prong and that the second prong instead demands an unbroken causal chain assessed under contract causation principles, not tort proximate-cause analysis. The court also declined to limit Kastner to cases involving criminal conduct, finding nothing in the Colorado Supreme Court's reasoning that would restrict the two-part test to intentional torts.
The court noted that Colorado's uninsured motorist statute is intended to compensate a person injured by an uninsured motorist to the same extent as one injured by an insured motorist, not to require full indemnification under all circumstances, and observed that the plaintiffs cited no case requiring an insurer to cover a claim based on the independent actions of a former passenger taken against the advice and without the knowledge of the insured motorist. The decision is unpublished and non-precedential except under the doctrines of law of the case, res judicata, and collateral estoppel, though it may be cited for persuasive value under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1 and Tenth Circuit Rule 32.1.