ST LOUIS, MO — A pedestrian accident resulted in the death of one person in St. Louis, Missouri on Sunday, October 27th, 2013, according to a news report from KMOV.
Authorities believe Mona Moynihan was killed when she was struck by a vehicle when she was walking along or trying to cross Interstate 44 around 12:30 Sunday morning.
Scene of the Accident
Mona Moynichan was killed in the crash, although it is not clear if she was killed instantly in the accident or if she was taken by EMS to a nearby hospital where she died a short time later.
Commentary:
While we regularly see alcohol related accidents in the legal field, rarely do these accidents indicate such a clear pattern of wrongdoing. People will look at this accident and be quick to call it an open-and-shut case, and they may be correct, but it may not be for the reasons they are fixated on. It is very easy to connect the fact that he was an alcohol deliveryman, he was allegedly driving drunk, and killed somebody, but the fact of the situation is it really doesn’t matter what he was delivering at the time of the accident. The fact that he was drunk behind the wheel of a company vehicle is where the egregious wrongdoing lies if the news article turns out to be accurate. If this company is a small, new operation, they may not have policy in place that forbids the driver’s behavior – but in my experience, this is rare. What is more likely, is the company has a written policy that forbids intoxicated driving, but the driver violated it anyways.
This unfortunately provides the employer a way to distance themselves from their employee by saying that he was operating so far away from company procedure that they cannot be responsible for his actions, when in reality a company is almost always on the hook for their employees action. If I had to guess, I would say that there exists some evidence that the driver of this vehicle has some kind of history of drinking, and the company was aware of it to some degree and failed to take action. Discovering this pattern of behavior would require extensive investigation of details that police often overlook.
