Greenwich, NY — A detached trailer from a semi-truck caused a major accident last month (Monday, December 22, 2014) that almost cost a woman her life. Patricia Jordan, 48, was injured that Monday afternoon after her SUV was hit by a semi-truck’s trailer on I-95.
This was near the Cos Cob exit on southbound I-95, state police later confirmed. Patricia Jordan was driving her Toyota SUV on I-95 along with a semi-truck. As they reached a curve in the highway, the trailer shifted on the semi-truck and suddenly became detached.
The trailer then launched out of control and crashed into Jordan’s SUV, pushing her onto a concrete barrier. As you can see from the picture above, her SUV was nearly pushed over the median entirely.
While the accident didn’t injure the truck driver, Patricia Jordan received minor-to-moderate injuries and was treated for them. The truck driver was later identified as Henry Nunez, 37, who was from New York.
At the time of the accident, Nunez was driving for a New Jersey-based company: Fast Xpress. So far, they haven’t made any comment about the accident, but the state police did confirm that Nunez was ticketed for not securing his trailer on the semi-truck. Fast Xpress was also cited, as the load in their semi-truck was over the 80,000-lb limit.
Scene of the Accident
Commentary:
I was doing a little research on this small company in New Jersey, and it appears that they are no longer active with the Federal Motor Carrier Administration, which is the government agency that monitors and regulates all commercial transportation in the U.S. Now, it also appears that this company was a one-truck, one-driver operation.
What does that tell me? Well, without speculating too much, I think this suggests that this company may not have been prepared to deal with an accident of this magnitude and had to close up shop. Of course, I could be wrong, but it’s usually bad news when a business is nowhere to be found online after a major accident.
So what kind of options are left for those who have been wronged by this company? The easy answer is to simply demand for the compensation that would make things “right” again. However, it’s been my experience that when a smaller company feels cornered after an accident, legally speaking, they tend to get very protective of their assets.
I don’t know if that’s the case with this company, but it would be interesting to find out more about them. The harder answer would be to see if there was any sort of products liability case to be had, meaning that some part on the semi-truck had malfunctioned.
But since this semi-truck was already hauling a load well above its normal capacity for weight, I think you’ll run into some problems trying to blame the accident on a faulty joining mechanism or something similar. The truck manufacturer (or whoever made the part that failed) could very easily redirect the blame at the truck driver for operating outside of the truck’s limits.
I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news here, but I wanted to be realistic in approaching this situation. The bottom line here is that a small company made a big mistake, and that can seem a little more complex than you might think. Getting a small company to reform its practices or even shut down is a good way to make sure that an accident like this never happens again. However, getting a smaller company to help their victims after a trucking accident is a little harder because smaller companies have more to lose, a.k.a. more incentive to fight back.
— Grossman Law Offices
