James Alton Banks, Jr. was killed when the motorcycle he was driving was struck by a vehicle driven by Hong Qi Liu. Banks’s estate and his survivors sued Liu’s employer, AJC International, Inc. “AJC”, for wrongful death because Liu was in Atlanta for a business meeting and driving a rental car paid for by AJC at the time of the collision. The trial court held that Liu was not acting in the scope of his employment at the time of the collision and granted summary judgment to AJC. Finding no error, we affirm. A defendant is entitled to summary judgment when there is no evidence to support at least one essential element of the plaintiff’s case.1 We conduct a de novo review of a trial court’s grant of summary judgment, “and we view the evidence and all reasonable inferences drawn from it in a light most favorable to the non-movant.”2 Viewed in this light, the evidence shows that Liu, a resident of China, was in Atlanta to attend a quarterly sales meeting for his employer, AJC. While in Atlanta, he drove a rental vehicle paid for by AJC. On the night of the collision, Liu was staying at a house in Alpharetta that he owned.
On May 30, 2002, Liu worked at AJC’s office in Atlanta until approximately 4 or 4:30 p.m. He did no more work after leaving the office that day. He went to a grocery store in Peachtree Corners to purchase items for his children, ate dinner at a restaurant on Buford Highway, and arranged to meet a friend later in the evening. The friend was attending a baseball game at Turner Field, so Liu drove to downtown Atlanta “to find a place, settle down, and wait for his friend until the ball game was finished.” Because he was returning to China the next morning, Liu planned to stay up late so that he “could sleep better on the airplane.”
