A Carluzzo Rochkind & Smith note: Following is an excellent article by Virginia Lawyers Weekly. We did not handle this case, but it brings up important points your personal injury lawyers should be familiar with. For more than 30 years our personal injury lawyers in Manassas have helped clients with such matters in Prince William County, Fairfax County, Woodbridge, and throughout Northern Virginia. If you have any questions or would like to schedule an appointment, please contact our law firm at (703) 361-0776.
Slip And Fall: Restaurant had no duty to maintain city sidewalk
By Virginia Lawyers Weekly – 4/13/2025
Where a woman sued a restaurant after she fell on the sidewalk, but the area where she fell belonged to the city, and the restaurant had no continuing duty to track the melting of snow and its refreezing as ice on a public sidewalk, the restaurant’s demurrer was sustained.
Background
Kelly L. Woods appeals the circuit court’s final order sustaining the demurrer of Sing Szechuan Restaurant LLC, to the lawsuit Woods filed after falling on a sidewalk outside the restaurant. The court held that the amended complaint failed to establish the restaurant had a duty to maintain the city sidewalk, where the alleged icy conditions were located. It also denied her request for leave to amend the complaint a second time.
Location
The allegations in the amended complaint and related exhibits, taken as a whole, permitted the circuit court to determine that the alleged icy condition was on property owned by the city—not on the restaurant’s premises. The personal injury photograph Woods appended to the amended complaint shows that the “patch” of “water or ice” at issue was on the city sidewalk.
Duty
Woods argues that a business has a duty to invitees not only to keep its own property clear of ice and snow but also to keep areas adjacent to the means of ingress and egress to the business’s property clear of such hazards. Virginia’s common law, however, simply does not extend the business-invitee relationship from the restaurant’s premises to the public sidewalk. With regard to hazards on the public sidewalk, therefore, the person remains a mere pedestrian, not a business-invitee.
An ordinance that requires landowners to “keep [a city’s] sidewalks free from snow and ice . . . does not relieve the municipality of [its] primary duty with respect to the safety of its public streets[] and does not impose . . . civil liability on [a] lot owner in favor of a third person injured by reason of its violation.” As a result, the mere existence of the snow-removal ordinance does not establish that the restaurant had a duty of care to keep the city sidewalk free of snow and ice for Woods’s benefit.
Woods attempts to avoid these legal principles by analogizing her claim to artificial-hazard cases to establish the restaurant nevertheless had a duty to her on the facts of this case. Woods’s claim of an artificial hazard, however, is not supported by factual allegations in the amended complaint. The photograph appended to the amended complaint depicts what is typically a natural hazard—ice.
Woods argues that the ice formed “as temperatures fluctuated[ and] the snow melted, refroze, and created black ice.” She argues that the ice in the photograph is an “artificial” accumulation. This is so, she suggests, because the restaurant cleared the snow from both its own walkway and the abutting city sidewalk “incorrectly,” creating piles of snow, which then melted and refroze on the city sidewalk.
The restaurant’s duty, at most, was to “use reasonable care for the safety of those outside the land to prevent direct harm resulting from [its] affirmative activities on the land” or adjacent to it. Both the facts in the amended complaint and those Woods seeks to add to a second amended complaint, as amplified by the photograph, the circuit court correctly determined the restaurant had no continuing duty to track conditions like the melting of snow and its refreezing as ice on the public sidewalk. The adjacent property owner is not liable to pedestrians under these circumstances because the mere melting and refreezing of shoveled snow results from “natural causes” rather than an artificial condition.
Motion
The circuit court did not abuse its discretion by denying her request for a second opportunity to amend. No amendment could place the patch of water or ice, which was clearly located on the city sidewalk, on the restaurant’s premises instead. And to the extent Woods suggests the restaurant could be held liable because it was negligent in the way it shoveled the snow—allowing it to melt and refreeze on the city sidewalk—that position is also without legal foundation.
Affirmed.
Woods v. Sing Szechuan Restaurant LLC, Record No. 0916-24-2, Apr. 1, 2025. CAV (Decker). From the Circuit Court of the City of Charlottesville (Worrell II). Harry S. Max (LM Law, PLLC, on briefs), for appellant. Laura M. Berry (Elizabeth S. Skilling; Harman, Claytor, Corrigan & Wellman, on brief), for appellee. VLW 025-7-075. 13 pp.
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