North Richland Hills, Texas — A person was struck and injured in front of the Christina’s restaurant along the Grapevine Highway this past Tuesday night and later died. Police identified the pedestrian as 49-year old Luther Norton, from Hurst.
The accident reported around 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday night, February 17. Apparently, Mr. Norton was trying to cross Highway 26 that night after having left one of the nearby restaurants. He was immediately struck by a car and was critically injured.
After being taken to a hospital, he died. Police said that they don’t think alcohol was a factor here, but are investigating some more. The driver who struck Norton stayed at the scene and was later released.
Map of the Accident
View from the Road
Commentary:
The news said that alcohol was not a factor, but I really wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it was. What I mean by that is, given the number of restaurants and bars nearby, I don’t think it’s far-fetched at all to imagine that someone might go out for a drink or even dinner and end up imbibing too much. Add in an over-zealous bartender who doesn’t know when to cut people off and you have fertile soil for something going terribly wrong.
Obviously, nobody here has enough information to say if alcohol was a factor, but let me just illustrate something here quickly. Imagine that this man had been at a bar and had far too much to drink. We’ve handled plenty of cases with similar fact patterns, including one here in Dallas where a woman got intoxicated at a bar and stumbled out of the door, tripped on the curb, and was hit by a passing car. As it turned out, the bar served her more than three times the amount of alcohol that’s legal in Texas. Of course, there’s something to be said for drinking to excess – obviously – but most people don’t know that it’s against the law for bars to serve you that much alcohol. When they break the law like that, bars can be held liable for alcohol-related accidents.
Again, I don’t know if this man was under the influence or not, but my point is that people often don’t get the whole story in those types of situations. The news reports talk about someone drinking too much and that’s it, they never mention that the bar might be facing fines later from the TABC or might be facing a lawsuit.
— Grossman Law Offices
