Vancouver woman sues golfer, club after ball flies through car window

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A Vancouver woman who says she suffered severe eye and facial injuries when a golf ball flew into her open car window is suing the golfer who hit the shot and his golf club.

Evelyn Mohr said she was driving her car on Beach Drive past Victoria Golf Club in Oak Bay last June with the window rolled down when the golfer, Kane Wyatt, “negligently struck a golf ball from the golf club that hit the plaintiff in the face, causing severe injuries,” according to a lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver.

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“At the time of the incident, (Mohr) was conducting herself in a safe and prudent manner,” it said.

She didn’t return a request for comment left with her lawyer, but the lawsuit listed injuries to her eye, cheek and forehead, cuts to her face, concussion, headaches, difficulty thinking, dizziness, nausea, emotional issues, chronic pain and fatigue, anxiety, sleep problems, neck problems and psychological injuries.

The injuries “have caused and continue to cause” her pain, suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, permanent physical disability, loss of physical, mental and emotional health, loss of earnings and a shortened working life, it said.

Mohr alleges the defendants, which also include the District of Oak Bay, are legally responsible for the damages because the incident was caused by their negligence or breach of duty.

Wyatt was liable because he hit the golf ball outside of the golf course, “failing to take any or reasonable care to ensure” Mohr would be reasonably safe , the lawsuit said.

The golf club and the district allowed the golf club “to be designed in a way that there were risks to individuals to be injured,” failed to warn of the danger of being hit by a golf ball in that area and failed to ensure proper netting.

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None of the allegations have been proven in court.

Requests for comment left with the golf club, the district and Wyatt were not returned by deadline.

Players whose errant golf balls injure another player or individual while on the course are generally not held responsible for damages unless they were reckless, according to previous B.C. court judgments.

A golfer in 2004 who was struck in the eye by a tee shot from the other side of a dividing hedge and trees designed to act as a barrier suffered a severe eye injury and was hospitalized for three days.

A Supreme Court judge ruled the golfer couldn’t be found liable, even though he didn’t yell fore, because a person assumes the risk of getting hit when they’re on the golf course. And the club wasn’t found responsible because it took measures to protect golfers on the adjacent hole. That decision was upheld by the Court of Appeal.

But a golfer who had her cheekbone broken by a fellow golfer who hit a ball into her from a short distance away was awarded $7,500 in damages in 1992, according to a separate judgment in Supreme Court.

And in a 2019 case heard by B.C.’s civil resolution tribunal, a woman who sued a golfer for hitting a ball on to an adjacent road to the Beach Grove golf club in Tsawwassen that damaged her truck, had her claim for $1,207 dismissed because she failed to establish the ball constituted a nuisance or that the golf club was negligent by allowing its golfer to hit a ball onto the road.

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The tribunal described a nuisance under the law as “a substantial interference with the use or enjoyment of land that is unreasonable in all of the surrounding circumstances,” taking into account the nature, severity and duration of the interference, and the character of the neighbourhood.

To establish the respondent was negligent, the woman would have had to show the golfer had a duty of care, breached that duty and the breach caused damage, it said. And the damage must have been reasonably foreseeable, the tribunal said.

The ruling said there was insufficient evidence in the case to find negligence or a breached standard of care.

The Victoria Golf Club, which was founded in 1893 and says on its website that it is the oldest 18-hole golf course in Canada in its original location and the second oldest in North America, in 1923 changed the course layout to end tee shots on two holes that had to fly over Beach Drive because of increasing traffic on the road.

There is no reliable measure of how frequently golfers or others are hit by balls but Golf Digest brought in a car-industry, 5 foot 10, 180 pound crash test dummy to determine that a golfer with a nine-degree driver with a club head speed of 170 km/h would launch a golf ball at 217 km/h with an acceleration force approaching 40,000 Gs. And it said the force applied to a ball at impact by a heavy hitter is about 1,000 kilograms.

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