AUSTIN - On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court affirmed a ruling that found the Texas A&M University System has immunity from a lawsuit brought over a traffic accident.
The lawsuit was filed by Kristopher Lloyd Fraley, who drove straight through an unfamiliar and unlit T-intersection on A&M’s RELLIS Campus, leaving the roadway and coming to rest in a ditch, according to the high court’s opinion.
Other than the yield sign, the intersection had no streetlights or traffic control devices, and no guardrail or barricade blocked the top of the T on the other side of the intersection, the opinion states.
The university responded to the suit by filing a plea to the jurisdiction, which the trial court denied. An appeal court reversed the ruling, holding that Fraley had not pleaded facts sufficient to demonstrate a waiver of immunity under the Tort Claims Act.
The Supreme Court agreed, further concluding that the alleged dangerous conditions—grounded in failures of design and lack of signage at the intersection—are discretionary decisions for which immunity is not waived.
“The Tort Claims Act excludes from its waiver of immunity those ordinary premises-defect claims based on the omission of ‘a traffic or road sign, signal, or warning device,’ when that omission ‘is a result of discretionary action of the governmental unit,’” the opinion states. “The court of appeals correctly concluded that the claims alleged in this case fall within this exclusion.
“Accordingly, we affirm its judgment.”
Case No. 21-0784