COA 373652 NICHOLAS NOBLE V FRIENDS AND FAMILY FUNLAND LLC Opinion - Per Curiam - Unpublished 4/29/2026

If this opinion indicates that it is “FOR PUBLICATION,” it is subject to
revision until final publication in the Michigan Appeals Reports.
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S T A T E O F M I C H I G A N
C O U R T O F A P P E A L S
NICHOLAS NOBLE,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
UNPUBLISHED
April 29, 2026
8:55 AM
v No. 373652
Monroe Circuit Court
FAMILY AND FRIENDS FUNLAND, LLC, LC No. 2023-146712-NO
Defendant-Appellee.
Before: GARRETT, P.J., and MURRAY and ACKERMAN, JJ.
PER CURIAM.
Plaintiff Nicholas Noble appeals from the trial court’s grant of summary disposition to
defendant Family and Friends Funland, LLC, in this negligence action arising from a bounce house
accident at defendant’s indoor play facility. We conclude that plaintiff has raised jury-submissible
questions regarding breach and causation, and we therefore reverse and remand for further
proceedings.
I. FACTS
On May 20, 2023, plaintiff—then a few months shy of his 30th birthday—was visiting the
home of a friend, Jesse O’Neil. Several other members of O’Neil’s family were also present,
including his girlfriend and daughter (who was roughly five years old). With the adults looking
for a way to spend a spring Saturday with children, O’Neil broached the prospect of going to
defendant’s facility in The Mall of Monroe. There, defendant operates a play space targeted at
children featuring seven bounce houses and additional inflatable slides. Plaintiff, O’Neil, and the
others agreed on this plan.
Plaintiff testified that upon arriving, “they told us that adults were free and just the kids got
to pay.” So the adults paid for the children and then chaperoned them in the play area, which
included the adults having some fun themselves, like shooting a basketball. At one point, O’Neil’s
daughter wanted to play in a “Scooby-Doo!” bounce house and asked plaintiff if he would
accompany her. He agreed. There was no attendant supervising the bounce house, in part because
defendant staffed only three employees at that time of year. While jumping about inside the
bounce house, O’Neil’s daughter asked if plaintiff could execute a backflip. He did one, and she

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asked him to do it again. The second time, he landed on his head and seriously injured his neck.
He alleges that he was paralyzed for some time and has regained only limited use of his limbs.
Plaintiff then initiated this negligence action. In his complaint—later supported with an
“Inflatable, Trampoline, and Amusement Device Expert,” Lance Miller—he asserted that industry
standards established a responsibility for bounce house operators to provide an attendant at each
device being used “to provide instruction and/or behavior correction” for patrons. Defendant
moved for summary disposition under MCR 2.116(C)(10), arguing that the industry standards
were not legally binding and that in any event plaintiff had only speculative evidence to support
causation. After a hearing, the trial court agreed, concluding that plaintiff could not establish
breach or proximate cause. It accordingly granted summary disposition to defendant, and this
appeal followed.
II. STANDARD OF REVIEW
All trial court rulings on motions for summary disposition are reviewed de novo. Maiden
v Rozwood, 461 Mich 109, 118; 597 NW2d 817 (1999). For a motion brought under
MCR 2.116(C)(10), a court “considers affidavits, pleadings, depositions, admissions, and
documentary evidence filed in the action or submitted by the parties . . . in the light most favorable
to the party opposing the motion.” Quinto v Cross & Peters Co, 451 Mich 358, 362; 547 NW2d
314 (1996). The court must grant the motion if the evidence “show[s] that there is no genuine
issue in respect to any material fact, and the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of
law.” Id.
III. ANALYSIS
Plaintiff challenges on appeal the trial court’s conclusion that he cannot establish breach
or proximate cause. We agree and reverse.
As an initial matter, there is no reasonable dispute that plaintiff was a business invitee.
While defendant charged only children, plaintiff was at least as much an invitee as those children.
The nature of the duty owed to invitees of entertainment establishments was expressed in Lane v
B & J Theatres, Inc, 314 Mich 666; 23 NW2d 120 (1946). There, the Court held that “[p]laintiff
was an invitee and, while defendant was not an insurer of her safety, the duty rested on it, and its
employees, to exercise reasonable care for her protection against injury in [its] theatre.” Id. at 671.
That is the duty that defendant owed plaintiff—to exercise reasonable care for plaintiff’s protection
against injury in defendant’s establishment.
What a defendant must do to act with reasonable care is therefore not a question of duty; it
is instead a question of the standard of care, and therefore of breach. This principle was established
in Moning v Alfono, 400 Mich 425; 254 NW2d 759 (1977). There, the plaintiff was a child whose
eye was injured by another child using a slingshot and sued the manufacturer and distributor of the
slingshot. The majority observed that the dissent “declares that there is no legal duty to refrain
from manufacturing slingshots for and marketing them directly to children,” but the majority said
that this “obscures the separate issues in a negligence case . . . to combine and state them together
in terms of whether there is a duty to refrain from particular conduct.” Id. at 432-433. The Court
further said that “[i]n a negligence case, the standard of conduct is reasonable or due care.” Id.

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at 443. This “general standard of care” is then applied by the fact-finder to establish whether the
“specific standard of care” was satisfied. Id. at 438.
Here, there is a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether the standard of care was
breached. Plaintiff points in particular to ASTM International standard F2374-22—Standard
Practice for Design, Manufacture, Operation, and Maintenance of Inflatable Amusement
Devices—which says that owner/operators are obliged to “[i]nstruct patrons on proper use of the
device prior to participation” and “[a]ctively monitor patron play and enforce rules.” It also says
that “[a]n inflatable amusement device should always be supervised by a trained operator/attendant
while inflated unless it is secured from unauthorized access.” Plaintiff’s expert further supports
this by opining that defendant “failed to properly service the Scooby Doo bounce house per
industry standards.” It is undisputed that defendant did not satisfy these standards, and a question
of fact exists as to whether defendant ought to have satisfied them.
Defendant argues that reliance on this standard would be a form of negligence per se, which
is improper where the industry standard has not been legally adopted in Michigan.1 We disagree.
The existence of the ASTM standard is not necessarily proof that defendant breached its duty to
plaintiff, but it is evidence of it. “[C]ustom and industry practices are relevant to the issue of due
care,” so “[a]n argument on the basis of industry standards . . . goes to the question whether a
defendant breached its duty of ordinary care.” Schultz v Consumers Power Co, 443 Mich 445,
456; 506 NW2d 175 (1993). Under the ASTM standard, the “[m]inimum number of operators on
an inflatable bounce . . . is one (1),” and there is no dispute that did not happen here. That creates
a question of fact whether defendant breached its duty. A jury is, of course, free to conclude that
the industry standard is excessively cautious, or that the context of a quiet spring Saturday
afternoon indoors at the mall rather than a busy outdoor summer festival calls for a more relaxed
specific standard of care, but nonetheless, the jury must decide.
Defendant also notes that a label affixed to the bounce house entrance stated, “NO flips,
wrestling or running,” and argues that plaintiff knew he should not perform such maneuvers inside
it. But the label also said, “DO NOT use the ride unless attendant is present,” yet the record reflects
that defendant only had three attendants on site for approximately seven bounce houses and
additional inflatable slides. In context, defendant effectively invited plaintiff to use the bounce
house without an attendant notwithstanding the warning label on the bounce house; if that warning
was not adhered to, defendant is in no position to fault plaintiff for not observing another warning
on the list.2 We find this argument unpersuasive.
We likewise conclude that plaintiff has established a genuine issue of material fact as to
proximate cause. “In a negligence action, a plaintiff must establish both factual causation, i.e.,
1 By comparison, MCL 691.1733(b) adopts certain ASTM standards into Michigan law for
trampoline court operators.
2 The parties also dispute whether the warning label is directed to the owner/operator or the user
of the bounce house. We need not resolve this question, however, because even if the warning
was directed to the user, defendant was at least arguably inviting users to disregard it by providing
very few attendants in relation to the number of bounce houses present.

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‘the defendant’s conduct in fact caused harm to the plaintiff,’ and legal causation, i.e., the harm
caused to the plaintiff ‘was the general kind of harm the defendant negligently risked.’ ” Ray v
Swager, 501 Mich 52, 64; 903 NW2d 366 (2017) (citation omitted). Moreover, “there may be
more than one proximate cause of the same injury.” Bordner v McKernan, 294 Mich 411, 414;
293 NW 889 (1940).
Here, plaintiff submitted an affidavit in which he asserts that “[h]ad a Funland employee
blown a whistle and told me that flip[s] were not allowed after I did the first flip, I would not have
attempted a second one.” That creates a question of fact as to whether defendant’s failure to
intervene is a cause in fact of plaintiff’s injury.3 And if a jury were to find that defendant’s specific
standard of care involved providing an attendant to supervise and warn users against dangerous
behavior,4 then the injury plaintiff suffered is “the general kind of harm the defendant negligently
risked” by not providing such supervision. It is precisely the sort of orthopedic injury that is a
foreseeable consequence of a bounce house user performing dangerous stunts inside the device.
We conclude that the trial court erred in holding that plaintiff has not demonstrated jury-
submissible questions regarding breach and causation. The judgment of the circuit court is
therefore reversed and the matter is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this
opinion.
/s/ Kristina Robinson Garrett
/s/ Matthew S. Ackerman
3 The dissent argues that this affidavit does not create a factual dispute because it contradicts
plaintiff’s deposition testimony. We disagree. Plaintiff was asked “[d]id you feel that you needed
to be supervised while you were in the bounce house like by an employee?” and answered “No. I
felt like it was safe.” We do not believe the affidavit and deposition testimony actually contradict
each other—plaintiff’s statement that he felt safe in the bounce house is not a statement that he
would have rejected being admonished for jumping. Even in the absence of the affidavit, we also
believe that a reasonable juror could conclude, based on the juror’s ordinary life experience, that
regardless of plaintiff’s subjective sense of whether he felt that he needed to be supervised, he
would have complied if admonished.
4 This aspect of the specific standard of care alleged by plaintiff distinguishes this case from the
trampoline-related caselaw cited by the dissent. Those cases all turn on a failure to warn the
injured person of the risks of using a trampoline. Here, by contrast, plaintiff has adequately
substantiated his assertion that defendant was obliged to do more than merely warn him and instead
to monitor his conduct and immediately intervene if he acted dangerously. If plaintiff had been
injured on his first back flip, we would find these cases more relevant, and plaintiff’s ability to
prove cause-in-fact would be more debatable, because even if defendant had provided an attendant,
that attendant may not have had an opportunity to intervene before plaintiff hurt himself.

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