Legal Question in Insurance Law in California

The tree owner is responsible, but the city/county responsible for code enforcement might also be responsible for not enforcing its laws. Your friend should have car insurance, comprehensive coverage should cover this loss. Good luck.

If your question is phrased correctly, Mr. Murray is completely wrong, except about submitting an automobile insurance claim. No one has liability if you stated the facts correctly.

You say the tree was seen as NOT being UNSAFE. Other than in certain strict liability cases, which do not apply to trees, a property owner must have notice of an unsafe condition that then subsequently causes harm, before the property owner can be liable. So unless the tree WAS unsafe, and KNOWN or the owner somehow SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that it was unsafe, the owner cannot be held liable.

As for the city/county code enforcement, government has total immunity from liability for failure to enforce regulations. Top that off with the fact that even in cases where government can be held liable, there must be actual notice of the unsafe condition and it must be on public property. As you state the facts, the tree appeared to be safe and was on private property. End of case against the government.

Now if you meant to say the tree WAS unsafe, then that is not what you said and you have a different situation. However the knowledge that it was unsafe had to be known before the accident, or something that would have been known if the landlord made normal annual inspections of the premises. A landlord is not obligated to bring in a botanist or an arborist to check every tree they have every year or anything like that. The dangerous condition must be apparent to a normal person, or there must be something that would put a normal person on notice to investigate further.