On April 27, 2012, Insurance Auto Auctions made a second attempt to locate and retrieve the vehicle, and again it was not found.

An employee of Insurance Auto Auctions said that, on May 3, 2012, Ms. Matute-Castellanos agreed to make the vehicle available for pickup at 3207 Henderson Mill Road the next day between noon and 5:00 p.m. The company said that when its agent arrived, once again the vehicle could not be located, and Ms. Matute-Castellanos refused to speak with the driver.

On May 15, 2012, GEICO assigned Mike Mitchell, a senior investigator with GEICO's special investigations unit, to locate the vehicle. Mr. Mitchell was aware of the previous unsuccessful attempts to retrieve the vehicle. During the course of his investigation, Mr. Mitchell said that he attempted to contact Ms. Matute-Castellanos, canvassed the apartments at 3207 Henderson Mill Road and Ms. Matute-Castellanos' previous addresses, interviewed employees at the management office of 3207 Henderson Mill Road, reviewed the tow logs for 3207 Henderson Mill Road, and spoke with Mayra Rubio, the assistant for Ms. Matute-Castellanos' counsel. Mr. Mitchell said that he informed Ms. Rubio that if the vehicle were not recovered, he would report Ms. Matute-Castellanos to the police.

On May 31, 2012, Ms. Rubio told Mr. Mitchell that Ms. Matute-Castellanos had moved the vehicle to a parking lot at 3559 Chamblee Tucker Road, and that Ms. Matute-Castellanos had since reported the vehicle stolen. (Ms. Matute-Castellanos alleged that the car was moved because GEICO's failure to recover the vehicle resulted in her receiving a warning that her vehicle would be towed unless it was moved.)

Upon visiting 3559 Chamblee Tucker Road, Mr. Mitchell could not locate the vehicle there either. He said that he spoke with a manager of the Kroger Shopping Center located at that location, and the manager could not locate any record of a vehicle being towed from that address.

On June 4, 2012, Ms. Rubio informed Mr. Mitchell that she could no longer get in contact with Ms. Matute-Castellanos. Three days later, Mr. Mitchell filed an incident report with the local police department.

The case was assigned to a detective, Chris Newberry, who conducted an independent investigation that included reviewing Mr. Mitchell's statement and Ms. Matute-Castellanos' police report, verifying the vehicle had not been recovered by GEICO or the county, attempting to contact Ms. Matute-Castellanos multiple times, and conducting a search to determine if any other government agency had located the vehicle. Based on what the detective determined were inconsistencies in Ms. Matute-Castellanos' report, her delay in reporting the vehicle stolen, her failure to return the detective's calls, and the frequent relocation of the vehicle, the detective said that he suspected that Ms. Matute-Castellanos had “sold the vehicle and reported her vehicle stolen.”

On July 24, 2012, the detective presented his findings to a local judge, who determined that there was probable cause for the charge of concealment of property, and a warrant was sworn out against Ms. Matute-Castellanos on that day. On March 8, 2014, Ms. Matute-Castellanos was arrested based on the warrant.

Ms. Matute-Castellanos appeared before a magistrate in her bond hearing, which was her only court appearance. The charges eventually were dropped after prosecutors determined that the statute of limitations had expired.

Ms. Matute-Castellanos sued GEICO, alleging claims of false arrest and malicious prosecution, as well as negligent hiring, training, and supervision. Among other things, she argued that GEICO was liable for false arrest and malicious prosecution because GEICO had “provided false information and omitted important information to the police in order to have [her] arrested” and had “maliciously and without probable cause prosecuted [her] for the crime of [c]oncealment of [p]roperty with [s]ecurity [l]ien.”

The insurer moved for summary judgment.

The District Court's Decision

The district court granted the motion.

In its decision, the district court explained that, in Georgia, false arrest and malicious prosecution were separate causes of action with similar elements. For example, the district court said, to state either claim, a plaintiff must show that the arrest or the prosecution was made maliciously.

The district court then ruled that Ms. Matute-Castellanos had “completely failed to do so.”

It found nothing in the record to indicate that GEICO had acted with malice in prosecuting Ms. Matute-Castellanos for the concealment of property. Mr. Mitchell never knew Ms. Matute-Castellanos personally and, in fact, never had the opportunity to meet with or communicate with her at all, despite his best efforts to do so, the district court observed.

It pointed out that Mr. Mitchell had contacted the police “solely because of the results of his investigation, not because of any personal hostility.”

Moreover, the district court continued, the detective's decision to have Ms. Matute-Castellanos arrested was based on his own independent investigation. As the district court noted, the law “draws a fine line of demarcation” between cases where a party directly or indirectly urged a law enforcement official to begin criminal proceedings and cases where a party merely relayed facts to an official who then made an independent decision to arrest or prosecute. The district court noted that both false arrest and malicious prosecution “may successfully be defended by an uncontroverted affidavit of the arresting officer that the decision to arrest [the] plaintiff was made solely by him in the exercise of his professional judgment and independently of any exhortations by the defendants.”

It then pointed out that the detective had specifically stated that “based on the facts obtained during [his] investigation and [his]personal judgment,” he decided to seek an arrest warrant.

Thus, the district court ruled, even assuming that Ms. Matute-Castellanos' allegations that GEICO had given misleading and false information to the police were true, the detective's independent judgment severed the causal link between GEICO and the police required to maintain a claim for false arrest or malicious prosecution. Given the absence of this causal link or any evidence of malice on the part of GEICO, the district court decided that the insurer's motion for summary judgment on these two claims had to be granted.

Finally, the district court also ruled that GEICO was entitled to summary judgment on Ms. Matute-Castellanos' negligence claim. It noted that, to survive summary judgment on this claim, Ms. Matute-Castellanos had to “produce some evidence of incidents similar to the behavior that was the cause of the injury at issue.” Because she had produced “no evidence whatsoever” to suggest that there had been any previous incidents similar to those alleged in this case, or that GEICO knew or should have known that such incidents had occurred, her claim failed.

The case is Matute-Castellanos v. Geico Indemnity Co., No. 1:16-CV-3756-TWT (N.D. Ga. June 29, 2017).