In Yan v. City of Diamond Bar, published March 11, 2026, the Second District Court of Appeal, Division 5 affirmed a jury verdict for the plaintiff in a case alleging Government Code section 835 liability for dangerous condition of public property. While the plaintiff was walking down a city sidewalk, a tree limb detached from the upper canopy of a Bradford pear tree on the street and snapped off two lower branches, all of which crashed down upon the plaintiff, injuring him. The city owned the tree. The city employs a third-party arborist to maintain the trees. Apart from trimming and handling tree-specific requests the city makes, the city’s tree oversight is reactionary: it responds to resident complaints by instructing the arborist to pick up tree debris. It keeps few records of the reasons for the debris. The plaintiff sued the city. The case proceeded to trial. At trial, the plaintiff introduced evidence of previous branch failures of the tree from which the branches fell, and of other Bradford pear trees in the neighborhood. The court instructed the jury that it could consider prior failures of the tree that injured plaintiff as to both the existence of a dangerous condition and the existence of actual or constructive notice of a dangerous condition; but that it could consider evidence of other trees’ failures only as evidence bearing on whether the city had actual or constructive notice of the dangerous condition. The jury found for the plaintiff. On appeal, the city did not contest the finding that the tree was a dangerous condition of property. It contended that the trial court erred in admitting evidence of the other Bradford pear trees’ failures, on the ground that the failures were not relevant.
The appellate court ruled that the trial court acted within its discretion in admitting the evidence. Evidence of prior accidents on public property may be relevant to one of two issues regarding Government Code section 835 liability: existence of a dangerous condition; and actual or constructive notice of a dangerous condition. The standard for admitting such evidence varies in strictness depending on the purpose for which it is admitted. When admitted to prove that the public property is in a dangerous condition, a prior accident is admissible only if it occurred under the same or substantially similar conditions as the accident at issue, although the prior and current accidents need not be precisely the same or identical. When a prior accident is admitted to prove that the public entity had actual or constructive notice of the dangerous condition, a prior accident is admissible as long as it is similar enough to attract the public entity’s attention to the dangerous situation at issue and thereby “impart notice of some particular condition requiring correction. This is a more relaxed standard than that applying to evidence submitted to prove a dangerous condition exists. Even prior accidents bearing a lesser degree of similarity to the accident at issue can still impart actual or constructive knowledge of a dangerous condition, including the need to investigate whether such a condition exists. Here, there was evidence at trial that Bradford pear trees have an inherent latent structural weakness. The trees involved in all the incidents were in the same vicinity, which means they were on the same grid-based pruning and maintenance schedule and experienced the same environmental factors that affect tree health, such as soil and water. The repeated recurrence of branch failures in a relatively brief period of time from the same species of tree subject to the same maintenance schedule and similar environmental factors also suggests a common problem that should have attracted the City’s attention to (and thereby imparted actual or constructive notice of) a particular condition requiring correction. The court’s instruction was adequate to direct the jury to consider the evidence only as relevant to actual or constructive notice.
Leave a Reply