Trucking Accident Attorney Blog

As a Missouri semi truck accident attorney, I was interested to read a decision in which fault was split in an unusual way. In Lasley v. Combined Transport Inc. and Clemmer, a traffic accident caused by Combined Transport caused traffic to back up. In the resulting pileup, Judy Marie Clemmer ran her vehicle into a stopped pickup truck, killing Mark Alan Lasley. Lasley’s father sued both Clemmer and Combined Transport, and ultimately won a jury verdict that found Clemmer 78 percent at fault and Combined Transport 22 percent at fault. Combined Transport appealed and won a reversal; the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled that the jury should have heard evidence that Clemmer was intoxicated. Ultimately, the Oregon Supreme Court agreed, finding that Clemmer’s intoxication was relevant to the apportionment of fault.

Combined Transport lost part of its load of glass on Interstate 5 near Portland. Mark Lasley was caught in the resulting traffic, and Clemmer rear-ended his stopped truck, pushing it into a semi and causing leaks in the fuel lines that instantly caused a fatal fire. Clemmer later pleaded guilty to manslaughter and driving under the influence. Lasley’s father sued both parties. Before trial, Clemmer admitted to negligence in driving at an unsafe speed and not paying attention, causing the death. On the basis of that pleading, the court agreed to Lasley’s motion to exclude evidence of Clemmer’s criminal convictions. Ultimately, the jury apportioned 22 percent of the fault to Combined Transport and 78 percent to Clemmer. However, Combined Transport won a reversal from the Oregon appeals court. It ruled that Clemmer’s intoxication was relevant to both whether Combined Transport’s actions were a substantial cause of the death, and to the calculation of fault. The plaintiff appealed.

The Oregon Supreme Court upheld the ruling in part and reversed in part, finding that Clemmer’s intoxication was relevant only to the calculation of fault. The high court agreed with Consolidated Transport that juries must consider each defendant’s conduct together, but disagreed that defendants should be relieved of all liability if their contribution to the harm was insignificant compared to other defendants’. In this case, the Supreme Court found, Consolidated Transport’s conduct was a substantial factor because if it had not spilled its glass all over Interstate 5, Lasley would not have been stopped. And expert testimony showed that if he had been driving at highway speeds, a rear-end accident with Clemmer would likely not have killed him. Thus, Clemmer’s intoxication was irrelevant to the crash’s causation. However, the high court agreed with the appeals court that it was relevant to apportionment of fault, so it ordered a new trial only on the limited issue of each defendant’s fault. A dissent argued that Consolidated Transport should not get a new trial because its deficient pleadings, rather than a mistake by the trial court, were the reason the jury did not consider Clemmer’s intoxication.

This is relevant to my work as a St. Louis tractor-trailer accident lawyer because more than one defendant is very commonly involved in trucking accident cases. Most typically, the defendants are the truck driver and his or her trucking company; they can also be third-party drivers or the local government agency responsible for the road. When this is the case, the jury must apportion fault to each individual defendant. Unfortunately, most individuals, including drivers of cars as well as truckers, don’t have the financial resources to pay a big jury verdict, even when one is obtained. That’s why even a finding of little fault, as in this case, is still important to my clients. As a southern Illinois commercial truck accident attorney, my goal is to get my clients the best possible recovery, and sometimes that means recovering what little money is appropriate from a bigger defendant.

Continue reading "Oregon Supreme Court Rules Jury Should Be Permitted to Consider Truckers Intoxication – Lasley v. Combined Transport" »

At 2:30 pm, a semi truck driving through Des Moines, Iowa, apparently ran a red light and struck a passenger car emerging from a local country club. Police report that as of September 21st, all four passengers from the vehicle had died.

The semi was being driven by 43-year-old Lockridge, Iowa, resident Kenneth Snow. The accident happened just past the intersection of Westown and Jordan Creek Parkways.

Lieutenant Jim Barrett of the West Des Moines Police reported, "The accident's under investigation but right now we believe the driver of the semi ran the red light. Iowa Department of Transportation is assisting. They have to do an inspection of the tractor-trailer and again we're reconstructing the accident. But right now it just appears to be a tragic accident."

85-year-old Arlene Laughlin, who was driving, and passenger 85-year-old Frances Sechler were both pronounced dead at the scene of the accident, killed outright in the impact by all reports. The other two passengers were 83-year-old Marilyn Harper and 95-year-old Margaret Bannister; both were taken to local hospitals but died as a result of their injuries.

According to reports, the four victims were all long-time, close friends. They lived together at the assisted living community, The Lodge of Ashworth in West Des Moines. They were described as very good friends both with each other and with the community's staff, other residents and visitors.

Jenise Rychniovsky serves as the Grief Counselor at The Lodge of Ashworth in West Des Moines, and said to reporters, "It's been more of a blessing for me I think being here than what I'm doing for them... to hear how close they were and how much fun they had and hear funny stories."

Police say that charges against Snow are currently pending, and that the investigation into the accident remains ongoing.

Most of the wrongful death cases I read about as a Missouri tractor-trailer accident attorney have to do with victims in other vehicles or on foot. In Nin Kao v. Alvarez, a case out of New York Supreme Court in Queens County, the controversy was over the death of a worker who was knocked out of a cherry-picker after a truck drove across the machine’s arm. Michelle Nin Kao, administrator of the estate of Xihui Ding, sued truck driver Neil Alvarez; his employer; the owner of the trailer he was pulling at the time of Ding’s death; and several defendants involved in the construction project Ding was working on. The Supreme Court of New York granted summary judgment to the construction defendants but denied it to the trucking defendants.

Ding was an employee of Star Window & Design who was installing windows in a construction project in Queens. While he was sitting in the bucket of the cherry picker, the arm was retracted in a way that left the arm extending into the road. Alvarez was driving past the arm at the time, and a part of his semi truck hit the arm of the cherry picker, causing the bucket to shake and drop Ding to his death. Nin Kao sued for common-law negligence and in the case of the construction defendants, for violations of New York labor laws. The defendants moved and cross-moved for summary judgment, with the trucking defendants arguing that they owed Ding no duty other than a common-law duty of reasonable care. Construction defendant NY Preferred also argued that the equipment was not under its control.

The court first dispensed with the trucking defendants. Alvarez and the trucking companies relied on deposition testimony from Alvarez and from an official with NY Preferred. However, the court said, this deposition testimony failed to establish how exactly the accident occurred. Without that testimony, the court said, there remains a genuine issue of material fact, which is enough to survive a summary judgment motion. The court also rebuffed arguments from Lease Line, the trucking company employing Alvarez, that it cannot be held vicariously liable for actions by Alvarez because it failed to submit evidence showing that an exception called the Graves Amendment applies. Next, NY Preferred argued that it cannot be liable because it was not an owner, agent or general contractor of the premises where the accident took place, a requirement under the New York labor law in question. On this issue, the court said, NY Preferred has submitted contradictory evidence as to who was the general contractor — again creating an issue of material fact as to some parts of the labor law. However, the court found summary judgment was appropriate as to another area, and common-law negligence, because it demonstrated that it was not in control of Ding’s work. Finally, the court denied summary judgment on a host of indemnification claims, finding they were premature.

This case is a good window into the legal complexities of dealing with deaths and serious injuries that take place when one or more participants are working. The trucker, his employer and the company that owned his trailer are all separate entities; and it’s not unusual for all three to have separate trucking insurance policies. Even if the victim had been an individual driver who was not at work, that still means at least four insurers arguing over liability and percentage of responsibility. This is one of the reasons it’s important to get help from an experienced St. Louis semi truck accident lawyer as soon as you realize you’re interested in pursuing a legal claim. Another reason is that trucking insurance companies can sometimes be very aggressive very early in the case, sometimes even contacting victims’ families on the day of the crash. This early start allows them to make a financial offer to people who are shocked and unable to think about their true financial needs, even if those needs are already clear. I strongly recommend to all victims that they politely turn this kind of offer down and contact our southern Illinois big rig accident attorneys for help.

Continue reading "New York Court Grants Partial Summary Judgment in Trucking Wrongful Death Case – Nin Kao v. Alvarez" »

A traffic accident around 7 a.m. on Monday, September 12, near Beaman, Iowa, killed one motorist and seriously injured the driver of the semi truck involved in the accident.

The deceased driver was ultimately identified as one Steven Humphrey, aged 42. According to the Parrot and Wood funeral home, Humphrey was a resident of Oelwein.

The wreck was investigated by deputies of the Grundy County Sheriff's Office, who released the following preliminary information. According to deputies, Humphrey was in a minivan and driving southbound on Grundy County Road T29. While driving through an intersection, Humphrey encountered a semi truck that rolled through the intersection's stop sign. The truck was being driven by William Thompson, age 55, a resident of Newton, Iowa. Thompson's truck was bound east on Grundy County Road D55.

The semi truck struck the minivan broadside. It is unclear just how fast the truck was moving, but it hit the smaller vehicle with enough force to eject Humphrey entirely from his vehicle. Both vehicles continued moving, ultimately rolling into a ditch along the roads.

Paramedics were called to the scene to evaluate both drivers. Unfortunately, Humphrey was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. Thompson, who was also injured in the accident, was taken to Marshalltown Medical and Surgical Center. There, doctors determined his injuries were serious, but ultimately not life-threatening.

Shockingly, this was the second fatal incident in two days for Grundy County, according to local news sources.

9-year-old Tate Johnson was riding his ATV a day earlier when he lost control of the vehicle while five miles east of the city of New Hartford, and apparently rolled it. He was killed outright in the crash. Johnson was a resident of Dike, Iowa.

Two such accidents back-to-back have surely taken their toll on local residents, and the semi truck incident demonstrates clearly the dangers that careless truck drivers can subject others to.

As a southern Illinois semi truck accident attorney, I was interested to read about a jurisdictional issue affecting an Illinois family. In Daly v. Central Refrigerated Service, an Illinois woman sued the trucking company whose driver hit her car and one other in southern Iowa. Barbara Daly was injured in the crash and her husband, James Daly, was killed; also injured in a separate car was Todd Iagulli. Iagulli sued in Iowa, but Daly sued in northern Illinois, where she lives. Defendant Central Refrigerated Service moved to transfer Daly’s lawsuit to Illinois, and after consideration, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois agreed to do so.

Truck driver Anthony Johnson was near Iowa’s border with Illinois when his tractor-trailer crashed with vehicles driven by Daly and Iagulli. The opinion did not give details or assign fault. However, the crash was serious enough to kill James Daly and inspire the two suits filed by Iagulli and Barbara Daly. Daly’s case originally named Johnson as well as Central as a defendant, but when Central moved to transfer the case to Iowa, Daly voluntarily dismissed the case and re-filed without naming Johnson. Central again moved to transfer the case to Iowa. It argued that Iagulli’s case is already pending in the same Iowa federal court; and the accident took place in Iowa. (Central is incorporated in Nebraska and headquartered in Utah.)

In its analysis, the district court first noted that venue is proper in both northern Illinois and southern Iowa. The next part of its analysis focused on the convenience of each forum to the parties. While the plaintiff has chosen Illinois, the court said, the other factors weigh more heavily for Iowa. The material events in the case — the crash — took place in Iowa, it noted, and it does not matter that Johnson was close to and traveling to Illinois at the time. Most of the non-party witnesses would prefer Iowa as well, it said; this includes witnesses living in Iowa as well as Texas resident Johnson, who said he would come to Illinois but prefer Iowa because he is already involved in Iagulli’s suit. The district court found that neither venue offered superior access to sources of proof, in part because the road where the wreck took place was under construction and has been changed. Thus, it found that the convenience of the parties weighs in favor of moving the case. It went on to find that the convenience of witnesses does too, because most non-party witnesses live in Iowa. And the interests of justice would be served by a transfer, the court said, because the Iagulli case is already pending in Iowa and because Iowa’s docket is less crowded. Thus, it granted the motion to transfer to southern Iowa.

As a Missouri 18-wheeler accident lawyer, I understand why the plaintiff fought to keep the case in Illinois. The Iowa courthouse is literally three times the distance from her home that the Illinois courthouse is. And after all, this is an action about her own damages and losses. However, I do not believe that a transfer to southern Iowa will necessarily harm Daly’s case. Iowa law recognizes negligence and wrongful death claims just like Illinois law, and may be able to provide just as good a recovery. This may be less true when choosing between two states that have a cap on the financial recovery — such as a medical malpractice damages cap. That’s why, if you do have a choice between two equally valid venues, it’s always best to talk to a St. Louis tractor-trailer accident attorney like me about the smartest move.

Continue reading "Suit Over Death of Illinois Resident in Iowa Tractor-Trailer Crash Transferred to Iowa – Daly v. Central Refrigerated Service" »

An early morning semi truck accident near Hubbard, Ohio, closed the nearby interstate for most of the day on the 7th of September.

According to sources, the shutdown lasted until at least late afternoon and caused difficulties for a number of drivers easily reaching into the thousands as they passed through the valley.

The accident, of which details are surprisingly few, happened around 4:30 a.m.; the highway was closed almost immediately after.

According to one motorist, the drive from nearby I-79 to the site of the accident usually takes about 20 minutes. Following the accident, the same trip took two hours.

"I was parked more than we were driving. It was terrible," she commented to local news sources.

People entering Ohio along I-80 were diverted onto Route 62 instead, at the Hubbard exit.

Families were left to try to find detours with their personal GPS units.

Interestingly, many of those affected by the delay caused by the accident were routed to the same Shell gas station near the incident. The owners of the station confirmed that they had done a brisk business helping customers get gas as well as finding their way around the mess. Apparently a large number of those affected were out-of-towners, judging by the fact that many of the license plates at the station at the time were from out of state. This could have contributed to confusion about the accident if most of the people nearby weren't familiar with the area at the time.

This story gives us a glimpse into what a semi truck traffic accident is like for other motorists on the road at the time. The people who actually know what happened are likely few and far between, leaving thousands to wonder just what is going on and to fend for themselves if local authorities can't get a viable detour route together.

A semi truck driver was killed on September 2nd in an accident on an Indiana toll road in the early morning. Indiana State Troopers who investigated the scene reported that the driver was heading eastbound around 4:15 a.m. on Friday when the driver's vehicle overturned near highway mile marker 85, very close to the toll road's Mishakawa exit. Rescue crews reported having to pull the man out of the cab.

Only one highway lane had to be closed while crews worked to clear the accident, which was finished by midmorning. According to authorities, the cause of death is still unknown. The driver's name has not been released, but it has been confirmed by state police that he was from Ohio.

That is literally all the information that was released to news outlets following this accident on Friday. The police haven't released any further details as of this writing. What was the driver's name? Was the driver drunk at the time of the crash?

Semi truck crashes have become so common that reporting on them, even when they involve a death, has become a routine matter. No one is surprised when a massive truck jackknifes, or when a driver apparently manages, apropos of nothing, to flip his own vehicle in the early hours of the morning.The fact that only one person was killed in this accident seems to make it appear very minor compared to the multiple-car pileups and hours-long, entire-highway-closed delays that result from other, more spectacular accidents.

The concern of this blog is that it will lead to an attitude that such accidents are somehow no big deal, rather than the severe and potentially catastrophic incidents that they usually are. A semi truck is a vehicle that outweighs almost every other vehicle on the road except another semi, and often carries loads that outweigh the towing vehicle itself. Such an accident shouldn't ever be written off as routine, if only for the sake of the victims of such collisions.

As a St. Louis semi truck accident attorney, I know that even when an accident is not a client’s fault, that client may still be less than a perfect driver. That’s why Missouri and most other states allow people who are partially at fault for their accidents to still recover money — they just recover less than they otherwise would have, proportional to their share of the fault. This is also true in New Jersey, but that state has another law that specially forbids survival actions when the driver who was killed was driving without insurance. A survival action is an action brought on behalf of a deceased person for negligence that caused the death; a wrongful death case, by contrast, is brought by the deceased person’s family for emotional and financial losses to them. In Aronberg v. Tolbert, the New Jersey Supreme Court extended the survival actions ban to wrongful death actions.

Lawrence Aronberg was killed at the age of 34 when a tractor-trailer “careened into” the rear of his car on the New Jersey Turnpike. His mother, Sheila Aronberg, brought wrongful death and survival action claims against the truck driver, Wendell Tolbert, and trucking company Fleetwood Taggart. The survival action requested damages for Lawrence Aronberg’s pain and suffering before death, medical expenses and funeral expenses. The wrongful death action damages for emotional losses to his mother and brother. However, Lawrence Aronberg was uninsured at the time of the crash; his insurance had lapsed three weeks earlier due to failure to pay his premiums. As a result, the trial court found the survival action was barred by a New Jersey law forbidding people who fail to carry auto insurance from bringing personal injury claims. However, the trial court found that the wrongful death action was not barred because it was brought by Lawrence Aronberg’s mother and brother, not Aronberg’s estate. The Appellate Division affirmed this in a split decision. The majority found that the two laws serve different purposes and that nothing in the auto insurance law can be read to prevent innocent family members from recovering because a decedent failed to carry insurance. The dissenters argued that the insurance law “unmistakably declares that no cause of action arises” when operating an uninsured vehicle. The defendants appealed again.

The New Jersey Supreme Court was more friendly to the defendants. It read the insurance statute as an attempt by the state legislature to give motorists an incentive to buy insurance. The Wrongful Death Act was intended to benefit immediate family members, it said, but the Act’s language says family may sue over any act that “would, if death had not ensued, have entitled the person injured to maintain an action for damages.” In this case, if Aronberg had lived, he would not have been entitled to maintain an action for damages, because he was uninsured. Thus, the court unanimously ruled that heirs may not bring wrongful death actions when the decedent was killed while driving without insurance. The majority in the Appellate Division ruled otherwise, in part, because it found that this would create an absurd result because it would penalize Sheila Aronberg for her son’s failure to maintain insurance. The high court conceded that “Some may think that such a result is too draconian and not necessary to enforce compliance” — but declined to overturn the insurance law, because no constitutional principle was at issue. Finally, it dismissed the argument that its own 2001 decision in Miller v. Estate of Sperling applies, noting that the claim in that case was viable. Thus, the New Jersey Supreme Court remanded the case with orders to dismiss the wrongful death claim as well.

As a Missouri tractor-trailer accident lawyer, I am sorry for Sheila Aronberg and any other families in the same position. The New Jersey legislature may not have intended to revoke innocent families’ rights to recover damages when it passed the insurance law, but it appears that this was the effect. As a result, families of people who are killed by negligent truck drivers will now be unable to recover any of the serious financial damages that a truck accident creates. This can include serious financial losses to a family that loses its breadwinner, as well as high medical costs for weeks or months of treatment for very serious injuries. Allowing truck drivers and trucking companies to avoid liability for their negligence is also very bad public policy, in my opinion as a southern Illinois big rig crash attorney. It remains to be seen whether the New Jersey legislature will be interested in changing the law, but the high court seemed to suggest it with its statement about what “some may think.”

Continue reading "New Jersey Supreme Court Rules Uninsured Motorists Family May Not Sue for Wrongful Death – Aronberg v. Tolbert" »