Sioux Falls, SD — A woman, 21, and her 20-month old child were injured in Sioux Falls this past Wednesday after their car was in a wreck with a semi-truck on Russell Street. Police said that a semi-truck tried to turn in front of the woman and child, but didn’t have enough room to clear the intersection and caused a collision.
This was at about 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning (April 7, 2015), at the intersection of Russell Street and Westport. According to the news reports, the woman and her child were in a black Dodge Caliber that was headed east on Russell Street while a white semi-truck was going the opposite direction.
As they came to the intersection with Westport, the semi-truck driver tried to make a left turn. Unfortunately, the truck driver misjudged the time he had and the woman’s black Dodge Caliber wasn’t able to slow down to avoid hitting the trailer.
The Dodge ended up underneath the back portion of the semi-truck, leaving both the woman and her child with injuries. While they were both taken to a hospital, the semi-truck driver was apparently charged by the police for failure to yield.
So far, no names have been released.
Scene of the Accident
View from the Road
Commentary:
I would say that this kind of accident is shocking, but I’ve seen all sorts of irresponsible behavior from truck drivers in my career. For example, we once handled a case where a truck driver was on his phone and not paying attention to traffic when he rear-ended a car so hard that two people were killed and one was badly injured. In that case, the trucking company actually tried to argue that the victims were partly to blame because they weren’t all wearing their seat belts.
That’s actually what I wanted to talk about today, seeing as how this accident seems pretty black-and-white. The semi-truck failed to yield (he was even cited by policed), so the accident is his fault, right? Well, it’s not that simple. My law student readers will remember from earlier articles that trucking companies always defend their drivers and they have a vested interest to fight your claim against their driver. It’s good business tactics for them.
In a situation like this, what would happen if the trucking company were to claim that the victim was speeding? What if they claimed that the victim had bald tires, therefore preventing her from stopping in time? I could go on like this, but you get the picture. There’s always some way to cast doubt or blame on the other party, and it’s up to the person making the accusation (the victim) to know how to use the evidence to prove their case to a jury. That’s another key point: understanding investigations and evidence. People often try to make claims against trucking companies by themselves, using only the police report as their evidence. In reality, courts won’t even allow a police report to be admitted as evidence unless you know to do a proper “prove-up.”
I don’t have room here to talk about all the different complexities to bringing a claim against a trucking company, but I wanted to illustrate how even a simple fact pattern like this one doesn’t “guarantee” that you’ll have a good case. There’s really no such thing as a “good” case, everything is contingent upon what you can prove in court, not what you think happened.
— Grossman Law Offices
