Articles Posted in Personal Injury

A woman injured in an auto accident tried an unusual technique to expand her possible recovery from an insurance company. She argued that, although her injuries occurred after one single-vehicle crash, they were the result of two separate and distinct acts of negligence and, as a result, arose from two legal “accidents.” The unique approach failed, however, as the California Court of Appeal agreed with a lower court that there were not two legal accidents, but rather two concurrent acts of negligence leading to one accident.

Kari Amaya owned a car that she insured with Mercury Insurance Co. Her policy covered herself and Ashley Amaya. One day in July 2011, Ashley Amaya allowed Carla Hurtado to drive the car. Hurtado was speeding on the freeway when a tire blew out. The driver lost control and crashed, seriously injuring a passenger, Monique Jones. Jones incurred more than $200,000 in medical bills. Analysis of the car’s tires revealed that they were severely worn, with less than 1/32 of an inch of tread left on them.

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Assessing fault in multi-vehicle crashes, especially those on multi-lane freeways, can be particularly challenging. The driver who creates a chain reaction of danger and harm may not be physically involved in the accident at all, and pinning causation on a driver not involved in an accident is often very difficult. This scenario played out in one couple’s unsuccessful recent lawsuit against a driver who allegedly made an improper lane change. The California Court of Appeal affirmed the outcome, even though the jury heard improper causation testimony from a CHP officer, since the trial judge issued a special jury instruction making clear that the jury was required to ignore the officer’s statement.

In 2008, Leo Pope and Judi Nightingale were driving on Interstate 10 in San Bernardino County when a vehicle driven by 19-year-old Debbie Sert struck them. Pope and Nightingale sued both the teenager and another driver, Thomas Stanley. Stanley, they claimed, made an improper lane change into Sert’s lane, causing her to lose control of her car. Stanley was not involved in the accident and did not stop at the scene. The police report stated that Sert, not Stanley, caused the accident by making an unsafe lane change.

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People on trial for civil wrongs like negligence are entitled to present a vigorous defense. This often includes attempting to shift some or all of the blame for to the injured person. However, the law, while allowing the accused to present a defense, prohibits using evidence that is more likely to instill a bias in the jurors than it is to prove or disprove the issues before the jury. One recent example is a California Court of Appeal case where the court threw out a jury verdict because the trial court allowed the defense to present evidence of the deceased victim’s marijuana use, even though there was no connection between the drug use and the accident that took the victim’s life.

The fateful incident giving rise to the case occurred when Randy Hernandez was driving on the freeway in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 28, 2010. Hernandez’s vehicle collided with one driven by Eric Lauderdale, leaving both vehicles disabled in the left lane. The men were standing near their vehicles when a sheriff’s deputy, who did not see the crashed vehicles, slammed into Lauderdale’s vehicle. The secondary accident sent Lauderdale over the five-foot-tall concrete barrier, but he suffered only a foot injury. Hernandez was killed.

Hernandez’s daughter sued Los Angeles County for negligence. At trial, the county introduced evidence that Hernandez had smoked marijuana and was possibly still under the influence when the accidents occurred. The county also claimed that Hernandez was responsible for the accident with Lauderdale. The jury deliberated and came back with a verdict finding the county 51% at fault, Lauderdale 35%, and Hernandez 14%.

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A trucker and his passenger received good news and bad news from their appeal of a trial court ruling in their personal injury lawsuit. According to the California Court of Appeal, the pair, who were injured when rear-ended by another trucker, could use the testimony of their doctors to establish the value of the medical services they received, but they could not use their unpaid medical bills, since a billed amount was not necessarily representative of the service’s true value.

The trucker, Joaquin Ochoa, was driving a semi truck without a trailer when a tractor-trailer driven by Jesus Felipe Dorado crashed into his vehicle from the rear. Ochoa was stopped in traffic on Interstate 710, and Dorado did not notice Ochoa until it was too late to stop in time. Ochoa and his passenger, Imelda Moreno, both suffered back injuries in the crash that eventually required surgery.

Ochoa and Moreno sued Dorado and his employer for the damages they suffered as a result of their injuries. At trial, the court refused to allow Ochoa and Moreno to use their unpaid medical bills as evidence of the reasonable value of the medical services they had received. The court also refused to allow the pair’s doctors to testify as to the value of the services they provided.

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A shopper’s sudden death from cardiac arrest inside a ‘big box” store in southern California triggered an important lawsuit analyzing the extent of businesses’ obligations to take precautionary steps to ensure the safety of their customers. Even though paramedics might require extra time to reach a shopper suffering a cardiac event inside a big box store, the law does not impose a duty on those stores to maintain a defibrillator on hand to deal with these emergencies, the California Supreme Court declared in a recent ruling.

The tragic events that produced this case centered around 49-year-old Ms. Verdugo, who was shopping at a Target store in Pico Rivera with her mother and brother. While inside the store, Verdugo had a heart attack and collapsed. A 911 call was placed, but by the time paramedics reached the woman, she was already dead.

The shopper’s family sued Target for wrongful death, complaining that the store should have maintained an automated external defibrillator for use in situations like the one that befell Verdugo. The family asserted that, given the frequency of sudden and unanticipated cardiac arrests (roughly 300,000 nationally per year) and the very large size of the Pico Rivera store, Target was negligent for not having available the equipment necessary to address Verdugo’s medical emergency. The retailer should have reasonably foreseen that a shopper might have an unexpected cardiac event and that, if such an emergency occurred, it might take paramedics several valuable minutes to reach her inside its massive store to administer care.

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Two teens injured in a vehicle accident with a truck along a southern California highway received a renewed opportunity to recover for the injuries they suffered when the California Court of Appeal decided that the trial court wrongfully placed the fault for the accident on the teen driver’s inattentiveness. The appeals court ruled that, since the trucker violated the Vehicle Code, that infraction raised the conclusion that the trucker was negligent per se and his negligence led to the crash.

The facts at the teens’ trial against the trucker showed that the trucker, David Hernandez, was driving his truck and flatbed trailer northbound along the Pacific Coast Highway when he pulled off for a rest break. Hernandez chose not to park along the right side of the northbound lane because it was too narrow a space and because the area was marked with “No Parking” signs. Instead, the trucker pulled into a parking area alongside the southbound lane. Hernandez positioned his truck so that it faced north toward oncoming southbound traffic.

To reenter the highway, Hernandez had to cross both the southbound and northbound lanes. While executing his reentry, a southbound vehicle driven by 18-year-old Joshua David struck Hernandez’s trailer. The accident injured both David and his 18-year-old passenger, Natalie Pierson.

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A driver found liable to the tune of $366,000 managed to escape the bulk of that financial hit thanks to an arbitration agreement that both drivers approved prior to beginning binding arbitration. Both drivers had agreed, in the event of an arbitration award exceeding $100,000, that the injured driver would accept a $100,000 payment as total satisfaction of the obligation. When the defendant driver made that $100,000 payment, he completely satisfied the judgment, regardless of the amount of damages the arbitrator awarded, the California Court of Appeal ruled.

The court decision resolved the case of John Hess and Elsie Horath, who were involved in an auto accident where Hess’s vehicle struck Horath’s in the rear. Horath sued Hess for her injuries, and the two sides agreed to binding arbitration. As part of that agreement, Hess agreed to pay the woman the greater of either the arbitrator’s award or $44,000, while Horath agreed to accept the lesser of either the arbitrator’s award or $100,000.

The arbitrator found Hess liable and assessed Horath’s damages at just less than $330,000. The arbitrator also awarded Horath costs amounting to $36,882. Several months later, Hess asked the trial court to limit the judgment to the agreed-upon cap amount of $100,000. The trial court refused because the law gives parties only 100 days to correct an arbitrator’s award and Hess made his request nearly five months after the arbitrator issued the award.

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A family whose elderly relative may have died horrifically inside a Southern California hospital received a reprieve in their legal action against the hospital. A California appellate court concluded that the family did not wait too long to accuse the hospital of wrongful death for erroneously placing the woman in a morgue freezer while still alive. Lawyers for the family convinced the court that the family could not have learned about the error until a medical expert made the discovery many months later.

In July 2010, an ambulance transported Maria de Jesus Arroyo to White Memorial Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. When the family’s mortuary picked up the 80-year-old’s body, they found Arroyo’s face severely damaged and disfigured. This damages was not present when the family identified the body shortly after death.

The family sued the hospital for mishandling the body. As part of this case, the family hired a medical expert who reached a startling conclusion late in 2011: Arroyo was alive when the facial injuries occurred, suffering the harm as she fought to escape the morgue freezer, where she eventually froze to death. The family modified their case in 2012 to add claims for medical negligence and wrongful death, accusing doctors at the hospital of erroneously declaring the woman dead, which set into motion all of the subsequent events. The hospital asked the court to throw out the medical negligence and wrongful death claims, arguing the family waited too long to assert them. The trial court agreed and dismissed the claims. Continue reading ›

An auto manufacturer, beset by multiple claims and investigations regarding a defect in its vehicles that caused them to accelerate uncontrollably, has settled with the federal government to end a criminal investigation into its practices, FOX 5 San Diego reported. The investigation, initially triggered by a multiple-fatality accident in Southern California, pursued the company for allegedly misleading customers about its vehicles’ safety in the wake of that crash.

Off-duty California highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor picked a “loaner” Lexus ES 350 sedan from a San Diego County auto dealership in August 2009. Shortly after leaving the dealership, the car’s accelerator pedal became pinned down, trapped beneath an improperly installed floor mat. The Lexus raced to speeds of more than 120 mph before striking another car, crashing through a fence and going over an embankment, when it ultimately burst into flames when it landed in the San Diego River basin. The wreck killed the officer and three members of his family.

Toyota Motor Corp. settled the Saylor family’s lawsuit regarding the defective Lexus for $10 million. The auto manufacturer also, one month after the Saylor crash, recalled 3.8 million vehicles with potential accelerator issues. The U.S. government, however, concluded that this response was inadequate and the FBI’s New York office began pursuing the company in early 2010.

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A brake part manufacturer’s liability to a repairman and his family for injuries the man suffered sadly evolved, after the man’s death, into a second case to determine the amount of damages the manufacturer owed the family for the worker’s wrongful death. In a January 2014 trial, an Alameda County jury awarded the worker’s family $11 million for the 17 years the man’s injuries — specifically, mesothelioma resulting from inhaling asbestos dust — shaved off his life.

Gordon Bankhead spent 35 years working as a repairman on heavy-duty vehicles. During his years on the job, Bankhead often handled asbestos-lined brake parts in the course of repairing or replacing brakes on the vehicles he serviced. The worker was also present for inspection of these brake parts. The nature of Bankhead’s job duties forced him to inhale asbestos dust emitted by the brake linings, which is extremely harmful. As a result, the worker developed mesothelioma, which his doctors diagnosed in January 2010. Mesothelioma is a rare variety of cancer where cancerous cells attack the protective lining covering the body’s internal organs. Exposure to asbestos is the most common cause for developing mesothelioma.

The worker sued Pneumo Abex LLC, the maker of the asbestos-laden brake parts, two months after his diagnosis. Pneumo Abex manufactured brake linings that attached to brake shoes and axles. Bankhead contended that the manufacturer knew the brake parts were dangerous, but failed to warn him, instead suppressed information regarding the parts’ dangers. A jury concluded that the manufacturer was negligent and that its negligence caused Bankhead’s mesothelioma. At the conclusion of the family’s first trial, a jury awarded $3.9 million in compensatory damages and $13.5 in punitive damages. Although the manufacturer appealed, the verdict and award stood.

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