Examples Of Significant Compensation Realized In Personal Injury Cases In Which A Person Was Significantly Hurt By A Motor Vehicle While Crossing A Crosswalk
By: J. Hernandez
Submitted: 2010-12-01 19:00:44 | Word Count: 763
So you try to only cross a street at a marked crosswalk. If only there were a guarantee that drivers would stick to the rules and grant pedestrians in a crosswalk the right of way. It is not uncommon for lawyers who help victims of motor vehicle accidents to be approached by pedestrians who were hit by a car while in a marked crosswalk. When a car accident involves a pedestrian the injuries are often severe and have disastrous and irreversible consequences. In what follows we explore reported cases with pedestrian injuries.
Case 1: This reported case involved the driver of a bus which hit a pedestrian. When the accident happened the victim was in a marked crosswalk. The driver failed to stop after hitting the pedestrian. As the bus kept going it ran over the pedestrian. The pedestrian a fifty year old woman, who was going to the store to buy presents for her grandchildren. The force of the impact and the weight of the bus running her over resulted in her sustaining fractures to her rib, fractures to her pelvis, and a fracture to her spine. She will have to undergo hip replacement surgery due to her injuries. The law firm that helped the victim indicated that they obtained a $1.25 million settlement for her.
[ advertisement ]
Case 2: This claim involved the driver of a rental car who was speeding while in a high traffic area of a large urban city. There were many pedestrians in the vicinity. He went through a red light and hit a van. This forced the van into a crosswalk which was being crossed by a pedestrian. The pedestrian, a twenty five year old man, suffered a spinal cord fracture injury that left him with full paralysis from the chest down.
The law firm that handled this matter filed a claim for the pedestrian victim against the driver and the car rental company. The case went to trial with a judge upholding $20.3 million of the larger amount awarded by the jury. This amount was designed to cover medical expenses (for the amount incurred up to the trial and for the amount for the care he will need in the future), the pedestrian’s loss of earning capacity, and past and future pain and suffering.
Case 3: This case report was about the driver of a school bus making a left hand turn at an intersection. In the course of making the turn the bus ran over a pedestrian’s foot. The pedestrian was a 54 year old female who was walking across an intersection in a designated crosswalk. The driver of the bus was ignorant of what had transpired. It took the efforts of witnesses getting the driver’s attention and getting the driver to go into reverse so that the wheel of the bus would release the pedestrian’s foot.
The pedestrian suffered various considerable injuries to her foot and leg. The pedestrian ended up requiring various surgeries to both her foot and her leg. In the end, however, she lost the leg to a below the knee amputation after which she experienced continual phantom pain. The report of this matter by the law firm that handled it indicated that they took the case to trial and attained a jury verdict for $5.9 Million for the pedestrian.
By comparing and contrasting these case we find first that each case is unique. Extrapolating from the lawsuit it is clear that a case can involve a car, a bus, a truck, or even a motorcycle. The victims, even when we consider cases involving only pedestrians, can be male or female and can be any age.
The claims, however, do tend to share certain things in common. The injuries are usually considerable and leave the victims with irreversible impairments. Crosswalks are no guarantee of safety for a pedestrian. Drivers can be distracted even in plainly marked crosswalks. And certain drivers simply neglect to follow the rules such as the speeding driver who ran a red light in the second case. Each of the claim concerned significant injuries and with the help of an experienced attorney on their side each of these victims obtained a substantial recovery for their injuries.
Author Resource:-
Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney accepting catastrophic injury cases. To learn more about pedestrian accident and pedestrian killed matters visit the websites
