TALLAHASSEE — A federal appeals court this week sided with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office in a dispute with an insurance company about covering costs stemming from 60 lawsuits filed after the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The dispute involved what is known as an “excess” insurance policy that the sheriff’s office had with Evanston Insurance Co. The policy’s coverage would kick in after the sheriff’s office paid the first $500,000 in costs related to an “occurrence” and a $500,000 deductible.
Families of victims filed lawsuits against the sheriff’s office after the shooting, arguing, at least in part, that a deputy who was a school-resource officer was negligent. Gunman Nikolas Cruz, a former Marjory Stoneman Douglas student, murdered 17 students and faculty members and injured numerous others in the incident.
In 2022, the sheriff’s office filed a lawsuit against Evanston Insurance as it sought payment under the policy.
The sheriff’s office contended that the entire Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting should be considered one occurrence. As a result, it said the insurance coverage should apply after the sheriff’s office paid the first $500,000 — what is known as a self-insured retention — and met the deductible requirement, according to Monday’s opinion by a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Evanston Insurance argued, however, that each gunshot that injured or killed a person was a separate occurrence and that the sheriff’s office “had to pay dozens of SIRs (self-insured retentions) before Evanston’s coverage obligation was triggered,” the opinion said.
A federal district judge ruled in favor of the sheriff’s office, and the three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based appeals court agreed.
“Construing the term ‘occurrence’ in favor of the sheriff, we conclude the entire Parkland shooting was a single occurrence,” said the 39-page opinion, written by Judge Frank Hull and joined by Judges Jill Pryor and Robert Luck. “Because the entire Parkland shooting is one occurrence, only a single SIR (self-insured retention) applies.”
In fighting the case, Evanston Insurance said the sheriff’s office had not incurred any judgments or settlements because of the school shooting, the opinion said. The company also pointed to state sovereign-immunity laws, which generally limit liability for government agencies in negligence cases to $200,000 for a single victim or $300,000 if multiple people are involved in an incident.
But the appeals court said the policy also applied to claim-related expenses, such as attorney fees. As an example, the opinion said the sovereign-immunity limits are “irrelevant to the coverage issue here. Because the SIR may be satisfied by ‘claim expenses,’ the statutory cap on judgments has no bearing on whether the SIR can be satisfied. The evidence is undisputed that the sheriff already hit that $500,000 SIR amount for the Parkland incident based on claims expenses alone.”
The ruling came in at least the second case involving questions about whether the Parkland mass shooting should be considered a single occurrence or multiple occurrences. In 2020, the Florida Supreme Court sided with the Broward County School Board in determining that the incident was a single occurrence.
That ruling meant that the overall $300,000 sovereign-immunity limit applied to lawsuits filed against the school board by families and victims. Attorneys for the plaintiffs contended that the shots were separate occurrences and that each plaintiff filing a claim against the school board should be able to receive $200,000.
