After a Wrongful-Death Settlement, Who Pays? A Minnesota Case on Proving Causation in a Failure-to-Warn Claim

The Facts

What happened

On February 26, 2022, an explosion occurred at the Le Center home of Aric and Jessica Holicky. Twenty-year-old Kailey Lynn Mach, who was housesitting for the family, was killed. An investigation by the Minnesota State Fire Marshal's Office and the Le Sueur County Sheriff's Office traced the explosion to a gas leak in an underground propane supply line that fed the home's furnace.

The underground line had been repaired in 2015 after a homeowner accidentally damaged it during a home-improvement project. O'Connell Oil Company, a local propane supplier, made the repair, securing the line with fasteners that included three brass connectors known as brass flare nuts. One of those brass flare nuts later failed due to corrosion, allowing propane to leak into the ground and, ultimately, into the home. O'Connell Oil had purchased the brass flare nuts from LPG & NH3 Supply, Inc.

In February 2024, Kailey's parents, Charles and Vicki Mach, sued as trustees for her next of kin, bringing a wrongful-death action against several parties, including LPG, asserting strict-product-liability and negligence claims. Before filing suit, the Machs settled with O'Connell Oil. They later settled with Boshart, another supplier of brass flare nuts to LPG, and with LPG, resolving the remaining wrongful-death claims.

That settlement did not end the case. LPG had denied liability and brought its own third-party claim against Anderson Copper and Brass Company, LLC — the manufacturer of the brass flare nut that failed — along with two of Anderson's distributors, seeking contribution or indemnity on the theory that Anderson failed to adequately warn about the risks of burying its brass flare nuts underground. Contribution apportions a common liability, while indemnity may shift the burden to a party with a primary or greater duty to bear it. LPG later resolved its claims against the distributors, leaving only its claim against Anderson.

Beginning around 2007, United Brass, an intermediary distributor, printed a notice on its shipping boxes stating that brass fittings should not be buried underground because soil conditions could cause deterioration, leakage, and serious injury or death. United Brass sold fittings to Curtis in boxes bearing that notice, but the record was unclear whether LPG received the fittings from Curtis in a United Brass shipping box. LPG sold the fittings to O'Connell Oil in clear plastic bags without providing notice of the risks of underground use. The parties disputed whether the box language constituted a warning and whether it was legally adequate; the Court of Appeals referred to it as a notice for purposes of its analysis.

Anderson moved for summary judgment on LPG's third-party claim, limited to the element of causation. The district court agreed with Anderson on two independent grounds: that LPG had an established practice of not passing along warnings to its customers, breaking the chain of causation, and that O'Connell Oil would have buried the brass flare nuts underground regardless of any warning. The district court granted summary judgment for Anderson, and LPG appealed.

The Decision

What the court held

The Minnesota Court of Appeals reversed the summary judgment and remanded the case for further proceedings, in an opinion authored by Judge Cochran (Bentley, Presiding Judge; Ross, Judge). See Mach v. LPG & NH3 Supply, Inc., No. A26-0177 (Minn. Ct. App. Sept. 8, 2026). This opinion is nonprecedential. It is not binding authority, although it may be cited for persuasive value as permitted by Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c). The court reviewed the summary-judgment ruling de novo, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to LPG as the nonmoving party.

In Minnesota failure-to-warn cases, negligence and strict liability merge into a single products-liability theory. That theory requires proof of a duty to warn and a causal connection between the alleged failure to provide an adequate warning and the injury. Here, LPG relied on that theory as the basis for its third-party claim for contribution or indemnity. Anderson's summary-judgment motion challenged only causation, and the Court of Appeals found genuine, unresolved factual disputes on both of the district court's grounds.

Whether LPG had a practice of not passing along warnings

The district court found that LPG's undisputed practice was not to convey warnings to its customers. The Court of Appeals disagreed that the record was undisputed. LPG's president testified in his deposition that when a manufacturer supplies a separate warning sheet with a product, LPG does pass that sheet along to its customers; he distinguished that practice only from warnings printed directly on a shipping box, which LPG could not physically forward. The district court had relied on the box-warning testimony while disregarding the warning-sheet testimony — which the Court of Appeals held was improper weighing of the evidence rather than viewing it in the light most favorable to LPG.

Whether O'Connell Oil would have changed its repair even with a warning

The district court also concluded that a warning would not have mattered because O'Connell Oil would have buried the brass flare nuts underground regardless. The Court of Appeals again found the evidence in genuine conflict. Brandon O'Connell, the company's vice president and an owner, testified that O'Connell Oil would have wanted to receive a warning that burying the fittings could cause serious injury or death. Pat O'Connell, the co-owner who performed the 2015 repair, agreed that the company would follow a directive not to bury the fittings and that he would have used other fittings had he been informed of a safety issue with burying brass fittings before the repair — though he also testified he did not know whether he would still have buried the fittings if he had seen safety language like that printed on the distributor's boxes, and Brandon O'Connell acknowledged the company likely still follows the practice of burying brass flare nuts and has not instructed employees otherwise since the explosion.

The Court of Appeals held that this conflicting testimony was not mere speculation, and that it is the jury's role — not a court's, on summary judgment — to weigh that testimony and decide whether O'Connell Oil would have acted differently with an adequate warning.

Open Questions

What the court did not decide

The Court of Appeals did not decide whether Anderson actually breached a duty to warn, whether LPG will ultimately succeed on its contribution or indemnity claim, or how fault should be allocated among LPG, O'Connell Oil, and Anderson. Anderson's summary-judgment motion was limited to the causation element, so the district court did not address — and the Court of Appeals did not reach — the other elements of LPG's claim. The court also did not revisit the Machs' underlying wrongful-death claims against LPG, which had already been resolved by settlement before this appeal.

Practical Takeaways

What this means for Minnesota injury claims

Several practical lessons arise from the decision, particularly for wrongful-death and products-liability cases involving multiple links in a distribution chain:

• A settlement with the injured family may leave claims between businesses unresolved. In this case, the Machs' wrongful-death claims had been settled, but LPG's third-party claim against Anderson remained. The appeal addressed causation under the failure-to-warn theory supporting that claim; it did not determine whether LPG was ultimately entitled to contribution or indemnity.
• How a warning actually moves through a distribution chain is a fact question. Whether a distributor's practice of forwarding some warnings, but not others, breaks the causal chain can turn on specific deposition testimony rather than a general characterization of “policy.”
• Testimony about what someone would have done with a warning is not automatically speculative. A witness's own account of how they would have responded to a warning can create a jury question on causation, even when other testimony points the other way.
• Packaging and labeling records matter. Whether a warning was printed on a shipping box, included as a separate sheet, or never received at all can become central, disputed evidence years after an incident.
• Summary judgment cannot resolve genuinely conflicting evidence. Even when a moving party can point to some favorable testimony, evidence that a reasonable jury could weigh differently is enough to defeat summary judgment on that causation ground.

Related reading from Andrade Law:

• our overview of nursing home abuse and elder neglect claims, where a family's questions likewise begin with who was responsible for someone's safety
• how negligent security premises liability claims address harm that a property owner or business failed to guard against

Case Information

Case information