THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL 30 | SEPTEMBER 2025 Kraszewski v. Baptist Medical Center of Oklahoma, Inc. But for every statement of black-letter law, there is generally an exception. Just a few years after Slaton was decided, the court carved out an important exception in Kraszewski v. Baptist Medical Center of Oklahoma, Inc., supra. The Kraszewski case dealt with intentional, rather than negligent, infliction of emotional distress claims, which turned on the timing of the injurious event and the alleged distress. There, the plaintiff asserted IIED claims against the defendant drunk driver for the distress of witnessing his wife of 38 years being dragged 60 feet under a truck. His wife ultimately died, but his IIED claims survived. The court made the important distinction that the plaintiff was not, in fact, a bystander but was a direct victim. The distinguishing fact was that the plaintiff husband was also injured in the collision, although not as fatally as his wife. The plaintiff was “struck in the shoulder, the chest, and the knee and knocked back from the truck.”71 The court laid out the requisite elements to maintain an IIED claim, stating, “It must be shown that: 1) the plaintiff was directly physically involved in the incident; 2) the plaintiff was damaged from actually viewing the injury to another rather than from learning of the accident later; and 3) a familial or other close personal relationship existed between the plaintiff and the party whose injury gave rise to the plaintiff’s mental anguish.”72 The Kraszewski case was particularly egregious in that the Kraszewskis, an elderly couple, were walking hand-in-hand in a Buy For Less parking lot when “the couple’s hands were torn asunder by the impact of the accident, the driver severed their thirty-eight year marriage.”73 The “accident” to which the court refers was the result of a severely intoxicated driver ripping through the parking lot, striking the couple and dragging the wife while the plaintiff begged the defendant to stop his truck. When the truck finally did stop due to traffic, the plaintiff held his wife “and comforted her until the paramedics arrived.”74 The Kraszewski case presented a “novel issue ... whether [the plaintiff] may recover damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress arising from seeing his wife fatally injured.”75 The Kraszewski court acknowledged, “Oklahoma has never recognized an action for mental suffering caused by witnessing an injury to another.”76 It reasoned, “However, none of these cases in which we denied recovery involved circumstances in which the plaintiff was actually injured in the accident.”77 In its analysis, the court made clear that there exist “two categories of parties in actions to collect for emotional distress – ‘bystander’ and ‘direct victim’ plaintiffs. Recovery is based on whether a duty is imposed on the defendant to avoid inflicting emotional harm to the party.”78 The court explicitly declared the Kraszewski case “factually distinguishable” from Vansickle because Mr. Vansickle was “not involved directly in the accident,” while Mr. Kraszewski “was a direct victim – he was a part of the accident which caused his mental suffering.”79 It further distinguished Vansickle by the fact that the aggrieved there did not observe the shooting of the girl, while in the Kraszewski case, the husband viewed his wife’s dragging and was “subjected to the same fear and danger which caused injury to the other party.”80 So the husband was a direct victim of the drunk driver defendant, and the defendant, therefore, owed a duty to the plaintiff not to run him down in a grocery store parking lot in broad daylight. The court put it a bit more eloquently by stating that Kraszewski established that the defendant Statements or opinions expressed in the Oklahoma Bar Journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Oklahoma Bar Association, its officers, Board of Governors, Board of Editors or staff.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTk3MQ==