Imagine that you reside in a gated community in Newport Beach and that your drug-addled and pampered son has been contemplating murder for a while now. In this case, what would be your legal duty to keep everybody away from that residence for fear of an act of murder?
That question was pending in an OC civil case related to the brutal killings of Kim and Richard Nicholson and their housekeeper Maria Morse. The incident happened in a costly house not far away from the University of California, Irvine, and Fashion Island.
Family members of Morse sued the estate of the Nicholson couple for $10 million at the least. Those relatives claimed that the couple had to tell Morse to avoid visiting their house when their son Camden was behaving strangely and threatening violence.
Indisputably, Kim and Richard Nicholson had to take reasonable measures to safeguard their housekeeper from Camden at their residence, but they did not do it. The couple was responsible for the measures because they realized that their grown-up son Camden was a danger to other people. The couple was negligent in inviting the housekeeper repeatedly to their house and making her clean it without taking safety measures, which included police intervention.
As per prosecutors, the grown-up man murdered his parents, whom he regarded as evil people and wished to destroy. As per court documents, the housekeeper was slain as she visited the residence the day after the killings there.
The lawsuit asserted that Kim and Richard Nicholson put their maid in a danger zone; as per the plaintiffs, it triggered responsibility for the couple’s estate. As per the lawsuit, any reasonable individual who knew the aggression, violence and rage that Camden showed daily would have not only contacted authorities but also warned others that visiting their house was unsafe.
As for the plaintiffs, the couple should have at least told the security personnel, who guarded their property round the clock, to prevent Camden’s entry and changed gate codes that he might have possessed. If the couple took any of the aforementioned steps, their son would have been unable to have unlimited and unpronounced access to his residence.
However, attorneys for the estate saw the situation in a different way. They told Judge David A. Hoffer that red-tagging the residence was not a legal duty for the couple to keep everybody from visiting it. By everyone, the attorneys were referring to people including grocery store delivery service folks, family members, friends, and even contractors for leaky pipe repairs. As for the lawyers, imposing that permanent duty on a homeowner would not be practicable, and it was impossible to reduce the duty to some written rule.
Attorneys of the estate worked to keep this case from reaching a jury. As a first legal attack, the lawyers noted a shifting tale about Morse’s death to undermine this lawsuit. As per the original legal complaint, she visited the property in her capacity of a housekeeper. However, the defendants claimed that a worker’s death should be handled as per workers’ comp laws, not at a court level. Then, the plaintiffs portrayed Morse as a Nicholson family friend who visited the couple to give them a letter that she wrote to aid them in placing their son under a conservatorship. This meant that the plaintiff parties changed the cause of Morse’s visit to the property.
As for the defendants, the above-mentioned change constituted a sham. However, the judge disagreed with that notion and ruled that the parties had the right to change their complaint when they learned more information. While the defense attempted to eliminate the matter of whether this couple breached any legal duty to Morse, this effort also failed.
The allegations in connection with the case were as follows.
- The couple knew the long, violent history of their son
- The adult had threatened that he would kill his father and mother, especially some days before that incident
- The couple financially cut Camden off some days before he murdered them
- The couple could have invited the housekeeper to the building after taking some reasonable steps
Considering the allegations, Hoffer found that whether a legal duty existed in this regard was a factual question that could not be solved at an early phase of the case.
As of September 2019, a date of trial about the couple’s assets was not established. Back then, law enforcement took Camden into custody, and he was facing multiple murder charges.
