For purposes of ERISA plan insurance policies, the Ninth Circuit defines “accident” or “accidental” to mean that the insured did not subjectively expect injury or death to result from his actions–so long as those subjective expectations were reasonable from the insured’s perspective. If the insured’s subjective expectation cannot be ascertained, then the court asks whether a reasonable person with a similar background would have viewed injury or death to be substantially certain to result. (Padfield v. AIG Life Ins. Co. (9th Cir. 2002) 290 F.3d 1121.) Here, plaintiff’s decedent drove drunk the wrong way on a one way street, flipped the car and drowned when the upended car landed in a lake. Drunk driving alone doesn’t show a subjective expectation of injury or death, nor is injury or death substantially certain to result. Here, absent sufficient evidence of the driver’s subjective expectation, the court holds that the driver’s death was accidental under the reasonable person standard. The court refuses to assess whether coverage was barred by the policy’s additional requirement that the injury result from a sudden unforeseeable external event, since the insurer had not raised that provision in the district court.