This property in the Shawano County town of Maple Grove, seen Oct. 18, 2022, is the location of a bonfire explosion that injured dozens of current and former Pulaski High School students four days earlier.
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – An insurance company must defend one of the people being sued for a Pulaski-area bonfire explosion which injured several people, a judge ruled, noting the “knucklehead kids” couldn’t have predicted the explosion.
Benjamin Van Asten, Isaac Nelson and his parents, Brady McAllister and his father, Brandon Brzeczkowski and Matthew Lindsley filed civil lawsuits against the same three defendants: Allan Eron, Samuel Armstrong and Tyler Frisch. They were among the more than dozen people who were injured when a partially filled drum of diesel and gasoline was tossed onto a fire Oct. 14, 2022, at a home in the town of Maple Grove, causing an explosion.
No trial date has been set in the case.
Mt. Morris Mutual Insurance filed a motion, arguing it isn’t responsible for coverage of Frisch, and asked to be dismissed from the case. But in a 19-page decision filed Thursday, Judge John Zakowski denied the motion.
One insurance company argument was that the incident was not an “occurrence” under policy terms, but that was rejected.
“Here, the Court concludes the split-second, contact explosion was the injury-causing event, not Tyler and Sam tossing the barrel onto the fire,” the decision states. “This Court can only speculate as to what caused the instantaneous explosion. Therefore, how could a pair of knucklehead kids be expected to have seen that explosion coming? Indeed, no one appears to have anticipated the explosion As the court commented during our motion hearing, if the risk was obvious to the kids, why would Tyler and Sam have put themselves in harms way, i.e. placing themselves closer to the fire (two feet) than anyone else when they threw the drum into the fire? It can be argued that their goal of adding fuel to the bonfire was to make it grow vertically but not horizontally with an explosion.”
A clause regarding an intentional-acts exclusion does not apply, the judge ruled.
“Given the record and the rule that these issues are questions of fact, the Court cannot infer Tyler’s intent to injure as a matter of law thereby triggering the intentional-acts exclusion. In the same way, the Court cannot infer that Tyler’s conduct was insufficient as a matter of law to trigger the intentional-acts exclusion. There is no evidence that Tyler had a subjective intent to injure anyone. However, it should be up to a jury to determine whether throwing a barrel containing twenty gallons of gas-diesel mix onto a bonfire surrounded by people is of “such a dangerous character” that this exclusion applies,” the ruling states. “The case will proceed to trial on the issue of the applicability of the intentional-acts exclusion.”
A previous ruling dismissed State Farm Fire and Casualty from coverage of Eron’s actions.
Armstrong, the teen who threw the barrel onto the fire, was sentenced to one year in jail. Another person was prosecuted in juvenile court.
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