Lawrence Wourms , as personal representative of ESTATE OF DANE WOURMS v. SCOTT FIELDS and CITY OF EVANSVILLE , WISCONSIN

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 13‐1178
LAWRENCE WOURMS , as personal representative of
ESTATE OF D ANE WOURMS ,
Plaintiff‐Appellant,
v.
S COTT FIELDS and C ITY OF EVANSVILLE , WISCONSIN,
Defendants‐Appellees.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Western District of Wisconsin.
No. 3:11‐cv‐00740‐bbc — Barbara B. Crabb, Judge.
____________________
A RGUED SEPTEMBER 12, 2013 — D ECIDED FEBRUARY 5, 2014
____________________
Before P OSNER , EASTERBROOK , and SYKES , Circuit Judges.
P OSNER , Circuit Judge. Sixteen‐year‐old Dane Wourms
was killed when, in a high‐speed pursuit in April 2007 by an
unmarked police car that began shortly after 1 a.m., his car
veered off the road and crashed. The personal representative
of Wourms’s estate (his father) brought this suit under 42
U.S.C. § 1983 against the officer driving the police car. The
additional defendant, the officer’s employer, is joined only

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2 No. 13‐1178
as a potential indemnitor should the officer be found liable;
we can ignore it. Another redundancy is the naming of the
estate, in the complaint and all subsequent filings in the dis‐
trict court and this court, as a plaintiff in addition to the es‐
tate’s personal representative. That’s equivalent to the gov‐
ernment’s filing a suit in the name of the Justice Department
and Attorney General Holder, as two separate plaintiffs. We
have reformed the caption to eliminate the estate as a party,
since an executor or administrator of an estate (and the per‐
sonal representative of Dane Wourms’s estate must be one
or the other) is the authorized suitor on the estate’s behalf,
not the estate itself or its beneficiaries. See Fed. R. Civ. P.
17(a)(1)(A), (B).
The plaintiff argues that the crash was caused by the po‐
lice car’s intentionally ramming Wourms’s car, resulting in
an unconstitutional seizure of his person and property. The
officer denied that his car had touched Wourms’s car, and
the district court granted summary judgment for the officer
on the ground that the evidence obtained in pretrial discov‐
ery was insufficient to enable a reasonable jury to find that
the cars had collided.
By basing his claim solely on the Fourth Amendment the
plaintiff commits to proving that the police car hit Wourms’s
car, for otherwise there was no seizure of person or car.
Brower v. County of Inyo, 489 U.S. 593, 595–97 (1989); Steen v.
Myers, 486 F.3d 1017, 1021–22 (7th Cir. 2007). It’s not enough
that the decision of the police officer to pursue Wourms al‐
most certainly played a causal role in the accident. Wourms
was already driving erratically when the officer, warned by
a 911 call from Wourms’ mother that her son was drunk and
“going crazy,” turned on his emergency lights to signal him

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No. 13‐1178 3
to pull over. The signal prompted Wourms to speed up in an
effort to escape. Soon he was going 75 to 80 miles per hour
on a stretch of highway that had a posted speed limit of 25
m.p.h. Fleeing the police, and at such a speed, was criminal‐
ly reckless behavior, Wis. Stat. §§ 346.04, 346.62; cf. State v.
Bartlett, 439 N.W.2d 595, 597, 599 (Wis. App. 1989); People v.
Pike, 243 Cal. Rptr. 54, 64–65 (Cal. App. 1988); People v. Har‐
ris, 125 Cal. Rptr. 40, 45–46 (Cal. App. 1975) (per curiam), for
which Wourms was as a legal matter entirely responsible;
the police officer had every legal right to signal Wourms to
pull over because of his erratic driving and his mother’s
warning.
Nevertheless had the cars collided, Wourms would have
had a good Fourth Amendment claim if it were proved that
the collision had been the result of the pursuing officer’s us‐
ing excessive force to cause Worms’s car to stop. Graham v.
Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 388, 395–97 (1989); Tennessee v. Garner,
471 U.S. 1, 7–8 (1985); Cyrus v. Town of Mukwonago, 624 F.3d
856, 861–62 (7th Cir. 2010); Anderson v. Branen, 17 F.3d 552,
558–59 (2d Cir. 1994). The exertion of force excessive in the
circumstances would be unreasonable. But ramming a reck‐
lessly driven car to induce the driver to stop, or even to
cause the car to crash, need not be unreasonable. Compare
Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372, 383–86 (2007), with Walker v. Da‐
vis, 649 F.3d 502, 503 (6th Cir. 2011). Suppose a driver being
chased by the police is going 100 miles per hour on an open
highway and ahead is a school bus moving slowly, and the
pursuing police officer reasonably decides that the only way
he can save the children in the school bus is by ramming the
car that he’s pursuing, thereby causing it to swerve off the
road before it hits the bus. The officer would not have vio‐
lated the Fourth Amendment, whatever the consequences to

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4 No. 13‐1178
the car’s driver. Scott v. Harris, supra, 550 U.S. at 386; Pasco ex
rel. Pasco v. Knoblauch, 566 F.3d 572, 579–82 (5th Cir. 2009);
Abney v. Coe, 493 F.3d 412, 413–18 (4th Cir. 2007).
The plaintiff’s lawyer argues that the defendant officer
resorted to what is called the Precision Immobilization
Technique, a method of causing a car to stop by ramming it
not squarely from behind but instead at an angle, causing it
to spin and stop. See “PIT Maneuver,” Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIT_maneuver (visited Feb. 5,
2014). It’s accepted as a legitimate police tactic in proper cir‐
cumstances, Sharp v. Fisher, 532 F.3d 1180, 1182, 1184 (11th
Cir. 2008) (per curiam); Helseth v. Burch, 258 F.3d 867, 869,
872 (8th Cir. 2001), but we need not consider whether those
circumstances were present in this case, because a reasona‐
ble jury could not conclude that the police car collided with
Wourms’s car. The district judge was therefore right to grant
summary judgment in favor of the defendant, see Russell v.
Acme‐Evans Co., 51 F.3d 64, 70 (7th Cir. 1995), since as we
said the plaintiff pitched his entire case on the Fourth
Amendment.
If the front of the police car hit Wourms’s car hard
enough to cause the car to swerve off the highway, there
would be marks of collision on both vehicles. There were
scratches on both Wourms’s rear right bumper and the front
left bumper of the police car—potential signs of a PIT ma‐
neuver. But the three expert witnesses—one of them the
plaintiff’s—submitted reports stating that the scratches on
Wourms’s bumper didn’t match those on the police car in
height and direction and so could not have been produced
by a collision between the two cars. The experts pointed out
as well that none of the paint on Wourms’s car had been

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No. 13‐1178 5
found on the police car (or vice versa), that there was no de‐
bris on the road at the place where tire marks indicated that
Wourms had begun to swerve, that the police car had left no
tire marks on the road (indicating that it hadn’t slowed sud‐
denly, as it would have done had it collided with Wourms’s
car), and that dents and scratches had been noticed on the
police car’s front bumper before the day of the accident. Two
of the experts opined (without contradiction from the third,
who was Wourms’s expert) that, to close the gap between
the two cars when the chase was reaching its climax shortly
before Wourms crashed, the officer would have had to gun
his engine to more than 134 miles per hour—and his car
couldn’t go that fast.
The plaintiff’s lawyer opposes the expert evidence with
amateurish conjecture, as when he argues that the skid
marks of the tires on the rear wheels of Wourms’s car can be
explained only as the result of the car’s having been struck.
One of the experts testified, however, without contradiction
by either of the other two, that Wourms had just reached a
point where the highway curved to the right, and the skid
marks showed that because of his high speed he had been
unable to keep to the right of the center line and instead had
slipped sideways. The skid marks made by the rear tires
were consistent with that hypothesis (called a “critical speed
yaw”) and not with the hypothesis of a rear‐end collision.
The lawyer emphasizes dents (two in number) in the rear
fender of Wourms’s car and says they were caused by the
heads of the screws on the front license plate cover of a Ford
car—and the police car was a Ford. This if true would be
powerful evidence of a collision, though not a collision
caused by a PIT maneuver, which involves hitting a corner

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6 No. 13‐1178
of the front car’s rear fender. But neither dent matches the
position of a screw on the police car’s license plate; the dents
are 2.7 inches lower than the screws. For the dent and screw
evidence to indicate contact between the two cars, both
would have had to have been braking heavily, which would
have caused the front end of the officer’s car to drop slightly
and the rear end of Wourms’s car to rise slightly. There is no
physical evidence (such as skid marks) indicative of such
braking; and remember that there was neither paint from
either car on the other car nor debris in the road.
The plaintiff’s lawyer points to the testimony of 16‐year‐
old Myriah Hrdlicka, who was sitting in a car stopped at an
intersection by the side of the highway and saw Wourms’s
car and the pursuing police car whiz by shortly before the
crash (which she didn’t see or hear). She told the police of‐
ficers who were investigating the crash that she’d seen
Wourms’s car fly past “5, 7, or 10 seconds” before the police
car; and there is no way the police officer could by accelerat‐
ing have closed such a gap in the short time before the crash.
So her evidence was actually adverse to the plaintiff. She
also told police that “if this is an investigation to see if the
cop had anything to do with it, I don’t think he did.
[Wourms] just crashed.” Ignoring this testimony (and simi‐
lar statements by a passenger in Hrdlicka’s car), the plain‐
tiff’s lawyer fastens on another version of Hrdlicka’s story,
given in a statement solicited by (and actually drafted by)
Wourms’s sister. In this version Hrdlicka states that the two
cars when she saw them were only a basketball court or
“maybe even a half a basketball court lengths [sic]” apart.
It’s unclear what she meant. There is no single size of bas‐
ketball courts. A National Basketball Association court is 94

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No. 13‐1178 7
feet long. A high school basketball court is 84 feet long. The
lawyer assumes—why we don’t know—that that’s what
Hrdlicka was referring to. But even if the two cars were only
42 feet apart—though it’s hard to believe that the officer
would have taken the risk of getting so close to a wild kid
(Wourms’s wildness was well known to the police even be‐
fore his mother had warned the police dispatcher that her
son was drunk and “going crazy”) who was driving 80 miles
an hour—this doesn’t mean the two cars collided. Hrdlicka
and her passenger testified that the police car was going
more slowly than Wourms’s car, which means it was falling
behind and, if so, then as noted it could not have accelerated
enough to catch up with and hit Wourms’s car in so short a
time before the accident.
When the police officer discovered the wreckage of
Wourms’s car, with Wourms’s body (not yet confirmed
dead) lying beside it, he radioed the dispatcher, saying: “I
got some damage here on East Main. He went off the road
on the shoulder, we got a rollover, we got a rollover next to
Stoughton Trailers need EMS [emergency medical services—
i.e., paramedics].” The plaintiff’s lawyer asks rhetorically:
“Might a reasonable trier of fact not ask whether … he was
talking about his own squad car … .” The answer is no. The
officer’s squad car had not run off the road, had not rolled
over, had not been damaged. He had to be referring to the
damage to Wourms’s car and to Wourms.
A FFIRMED

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