Armenui Dzhgalian and Aida Melikyan were medical students who, in 2007, participated in an unpaid internship at Griffin Hospital in Connecticut. During the internship, they lived with hospital employee Maria Nantes in her home. Nantes drove the students to the hospital each day and they paid their share of utilities and car expenses.

On February 12, Nantes drove Dzhgalian and Melikyan home, parked her car in the attached garage, and closed the garage door. She did not turn off the car engine. The car ran all night and the house filled with carbon monoxide. Dzhgalian and Melikyan suffered serious neurological injuries from carbon monoxide poisoning and additional injuries when Nantes pulled them, unconscious, out of the house.

Nantes filed claims with her homeowner’s insurer, New London County Mutual Insurance Company, for Dzhgalian and Melikyan’s medical expenses. The insurer denied coverage, citing the following policy exclusion: “[c]overage [for] [p]ersonal [l]iability and . . . [m]edical [p]ayments to [o]thers do[es] not apply to ‘bodily injury’ or ‘property damage’ . . . [a]rising out of . . . [t]he ownership, maintenance, use, loading or unloading of motor vehicles or all other motorized land conveyances, including trailers, owned or operated by or rented or loaned to an ‘insured.’”

Dzhgalian and Melikyan eventually filed a lawsuit against Nantes. New London filed a declaratory judgment action against Nantes, Dzhgalian, Melikyan, and Nantes’s automobile insurer, seeking a declaration that Nantes’s homeowner’s policy did not cover the injuries because they fell within the “arising out of” policy exclusion. The trial court found in favor of New London, and the defendants appealed.

On appeal, defendants argued that Dzhgalian and Melikyan’s injuries did not arise out of the use of a motor vehicle within the meaning of the policy because leaving a car in one’s garage did not constitute the use of a motor vehicle. They also argued that, even if the injuries did arise out of the use of a motor vehicle, Nantes’s act of closing the garage door was a covered event and thus a “concurrent cause” of the injuries. The Supreme Court of Connecticut disagreed with both of these arguments. The court noted that parking was “plainly an employment of a car for some purpose of the user” and that “the act of parking does not fail to be an employment of a car for some purpose of the user merely because the user performs the act negligently.” It also reasoned that it was irrelevant that Nantes’s closing of the garage door was a contributing cause of Dzhgalian and Melikyan’s injuries. According to the court, the fact that Nantes’s use of her motor vehicle was “connected to or created a condition that caused [the injuries]” was enough to bring them within the motor vehicle exclusion.

Finally, the defendants argued that the injuries Dzhgalian and Melikyan sustained when Nantes dragged them from her home did not fall within the motor vehicle exclusion because the act of dragging was an act “separate and independent from the carbon monoxide incident.” Again, the court disagreed. It reasoned that it was foreseeable that Nantes or a third person might attempt to remove Dzhgalian and Melikyan from the peril caused by Nantes’s negligent act. Thus, the act was the proximate cause of the dragging injuries.

The court concluded that Dzhgalian and Melikyan’s injuries fell within the motor vehicle exclusion of the homeowner’s policy and there was no coverage.

The decision of the lower court was affirmed.

New London County Mutual Insurance Company vs. Nantes-Nos. 18758, 18759-Supreme Court of Connecticut-February 21, 2012-36 Atlantic Reporter 3d 224