Lopez v. McDonald’s Corp. is the 1987 California appellate decision holding that McDonald’s had no legal duty to protect customers at its San Ysidro restaurant from the mass shooting James Oliver Huberty carried out there on July 18, 1984. The Court of Appeal ruled that the attack was unforeseeable as a matter of law and that, even if the restaurant had hired the unarmed guard plaintiffs said it should have, no reasonable jury could find that guard would have stopped a heavily armed gunman. The decision became the leading precedent shielding businesses from liability for third-party mass shootings, and it has only recently begun to erode.
The Shooting Behind the Case
On the afternoon of July 18, 1984, Huberty walked into the McDonald’s at 522 West San Ysidro Boulevard with a 9mm Browning pistol, a 9mm Uzi semiautomatic, and a Winchester 12-gauge shotgun. Over roughly 77 minutes he fired more than 250 rounds, killing 21 people and wounding 19 others before a SWAT sharpshooter killed him with a single shot.1EBSCO. San Ysidro McDonald’s Massacre At the time it was the deadliest mass public shooting in United States history.2KPBS. They Survived the San Ysidro McDonald’s Massacre in 1984
What the Plaintiffs Argued
Survivors and victims’ families sued McDonald’s Corporation and its franchisee for wrongful death and personal injuries. Their theory was straightforward premises liability: the restaurant sat in what they described as a high-crime area, had a history of thefts, robberies, and assaults at or near the location, and had turned down a specific proposal from Allegiance Security Incorporated to station a uniformed guard on site for $5.75 an hour. Management rejected the offer for economic reasons. Given that record, plaintiffs argued, McDonald’s should have anticipated violent crime on its premises and taken reasonable steps to prevent it.3Justia. Lopez v. McDonald’s Corp., 193 Cal. App. 3d 495
How the Courts Ruled
McDonald’s moved for summary judgment on three grounds: the massacre was unprecedented and unforeseeable, requiring a restaurant to guard against it would be impractical and against public policy, and there was no causal link between the absence of security and the injuries. The trial court agreed, ruling as a matter of law that McDonald’s had no duty to protect patrons from a mass murderous assault.4FindLaw. Toscano Lopez v. McDonald’s
The Duty Question
On July 9, 1987, the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District affirmed. Writing for the court, Associate Justice Work acknowledged that businesses generally must take reasonable steps to protect customers from foreseeable criminal acts. But he drew a sharp line between the property crimes and low-level assaults near the restaurant and the “maniacal, mass murderous assault” Huberty committed. Prior thefts and vandalism, the court wrote, did not “portend disasters of this type.” It compared the massacre to a meteor strike: something that can happen anywhere, regardless of the local crime rate. Applying California’s Rowland v. Christian balancing test, the court found the burden of preventing such an attack would be “onerous” and that the security measures needed to stop a heavily armed, suicidal gunman “defy exact delineation.”3Justia. Lopez v. McDonald’s Corp., 193 Cal. App. 3d 495
The Causation Question
The court also held that even if McDonald’s had hired the unarmed guard plaintiffs proposed, no reasonable jury could find that guard would have deterred or stopped a “suicide-bent murderer” carrying multiple firearms. Plaintiffs’ theory, the opinion said, amounted to “abstract negligence” with no real-world connection to the outcome.4FindLaw. Toscano Lopez v. McDonald’s
The Precedent and Its Erosion
For decades, Lopez served as the leading authority shielding businesses from liability for mass shootings carried out by third parties. Courts around the country repeated its core logic: a random, motiveless mass killing is so far outside normal experience that no reasonable business owner would be expected to anticipate it, and local crime statistics involving theft or vandalism have “no relationship to purposeful homicide.”3Justia. Lopez v. McDonald’s Corp., 193 Cal. App. 3d 495
That framework has faced pressure as mass shootings have grown more frequent. In Axelrod v. Cinemark Holdings, Inc. (2014), arising from the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting, a federal judge acknowledged Lopez but declined to treat it as dispositive. The court noted that mass shootings were no longer “so unlikely to occur within the setting of modern life” as to be unforeseeable as a matter of law. Cinemark’s own management had hired a security firm in 2009 that specifically recommended developing active-shooter procedures. The judge sent the foreseeability question to a jury rather than dismissing the case, though Cinemark ultimately prevailed on causation.5CaseMine. Axelrod v. Cinemark Holdings, Inc.
A Colorado appellate court went further in Wagner v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. (2019), reversing a lower court’s dismissal and ruling that a mass shooting could be deemed foreseeable if the property owner had specific knowledge of the risk. The court also allowed that a jury could find a business’s failure to provide security was a “substantial factor” in the harm, even though the shooter’s intentional acts were the immediate cause. The case went to trial and the jury found the defendant not liable, but the appellate ruling opened a door Lopez had seemed to close.6ASIS International. Who’s Liable for an Active Shooter
Lopez remains good law on its own facts. What has changed is the willingness of courts to let juries decide whether a particular business should have anticipated the risk of a mass shooting given what it knew, rather than deciding foreseeability as a matter of law at the pleading stage.
The Other Lawsuits That Followed the Massacre
The premises liability case was not the only litigation to come out of San Ysidro. A separate group of plaintiffs sued the City of San Diego, then-Mayor Roger Hedgecock, and Police Chief William Kolender, alleging that poor planning and decision-making by senior officers during the standoff prolonged the killing. The Fourth District Court of Appeal upheld dismissal on March 24, 1987, holding that police could not be held liable absent “specific assurances” to the victims that they detrimentally relied on, and finding no such assurances existed. The California Supreme Court declined to review.7Los Angeles Times. Court Rules in Favor of San Diego in McDonald’s Massacre Suits8City of San Diego. Lopez, et al. v. City of San Diego, et al., 190 Cal. App. 3d 678
Attorney David Korrey filed suit against the company that imported the Uzi Huberty used. A U.S. District Court judge in San Diego tentatively dismissed those claims in 1986.9Los Angeles Times. McDonald’s Massacre Litigation Update
On July 18, 1986, the second anniversary of the shooting, Huberty’s widow Etna and their two daughters filed a $5 million wrongful-death suit against McDonald’s and his former employer, Babcock and Wilcox. The theory was that monosodium glutamate in Chicken McNuggets had reacted with lead and cadmium accumulated in Huberty’s body from 14 years of welding, triggering his violent breakdown. Huberty’s body was never tested for MSG during the autopsy.10UPI. Widow Says McNuggets Triggered Shooting Spree Available records do not document a final disposition, but the litigation has been characterized as unsuccessful.11EBSCO. James Oliver Huberty
Every lawsuit arising from the San Ysidro massacre ultimately failed. The one that mattered most for the law was Lopez, and the rule it announced, that a business owes no duty to guard against a mass shooting no one could reasonably foresee, is the reason.