The lodge was insured by Kinsale Insurance Company, and its policy included a $50,000 limit for assault and battery. (Credit: Shutterstock)

In 2015, a woman was shot in the forehead during a brawl outside a Florida lodge and later died from her injuries. A decade later, a federal appeals court decided a bad faith suit against the lodge’s insurance company for how they handled the aftermath of the shooting will be tried by a jury.

According to the suit, on March 1, 2015, two groups of women were involved in a fight on the dance floor of the Pride of St. Lucie Lodge 1189. They were removed from the building through separate exits by lodge security, but the groups reconvened in a back parking lot where a second fight erupted. This culminated with Tanya Oliver being shot in the forehead, which left her in a coma. She died from her injuries the following year.

The lodge was insured by Kinsale Insurance Company, and its policy included a $50,000 limit for assault and battery. Oliver’s estate eventually sued the lodge because of alleged security negligence and a jury awarded damages exceeding $3.348 million, which surpassed the policy limits. The estate then sued Kinsale for common bad faith under Florida law.

The court opinion on the case filed on April 18, 2025, explains, “The Lodge and the Estate claim that Kinsale breached its duty of good faith by failing to make a settlement offer within the policy limits before the Estate’s claim was filed. The district court granted summary judgment to Kinsale on the ground that Kinsale had no duty to initiate settlement negotiations because, viewed in the light most favorable to the non-moving parties, no reasonable jury could find that this was a case of ‘clear liability.’”

The court said that when viewing the case evidence in a light most favorable to the lodge and Oliver’s estate, a jury could reasonably find that Kinsale knew, or should have known, that liability in the case was clear because the lodge’s security sent the groups out into the parking lot unsupervised in the midst of the fight. This, they say, is what led to the second, more serious conflict in which Oliver was shot.

“Moreover, a jury could reasonably find that Kinsale well knew that Oliver had been shot in the head, she remained in critical condition for an extended period of time, and her injuries were catastrophic, with damages reaching far beyond Kinsale’s policy limit,” the court opinion stated.

As such, the court reversed the entry of summary judgment in the case and remanded it to a jury trial.

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