Silsbee, TX — There was an accident reported in rural Silsbee this past Tuesday (October 6, 2015) that left a local man Beaumont with serious injuries. Police said that Hardikkumar Shrumali, 23 years old, was badly hurt after his car, a Saturn, was in a head-on wreck with an 18-wheeler truck.
This happened along FM 92, at the intersection with Gore Store Road, the reports said.
Mr. Shrumali was driving his Saturn south along FM 92 that Tuesday morning, around 4:30 a.m., when he lost control for unknown reasons and swerved into oncoming traffic, hitting a southbound 18-wheeler head-on.
The wreck left Shrumali with serious injuries and he required a medical helicopter to take him to a hospital in Beaumont.
The truck driver, identified as 45-year-old George Brown of Silsbee, wasn’t badly injured, but was taken to a hospital anyway.
Right now, it’s not clear what caused his car to lose control that morning.
Map of the Accident
Commentary:
One of the possible explanations for an accident that early in the morning, obviously, is that alcohol was involved. Now, I know that the news reports don’t make any specific mention of alcohol being a factor, but I wanted to point it out because it raises an interesting question. If someone gets drunk and injures themselves in an accident, is it really all their fault?
According to Texas law, if they had been drinking at a bar (or some place that has a license to serve alcohol), then it might not be. Bars in Texas aren’t allowed to serve alcohol to people who are obviously intoxicated and a clear danger to themselves. The reasoning is that since impaired people don’t make good decisions, the bar has the responsibility (as the licensed provider of alcohol) to make sure that their customers are being served too much to drink. To take it a step further, though, Texas law also says that when a bar over-serves a customer who then gets into an accident and hurts themselves due to their intoxicated state, both the driver and the bar are liable for the injuries sustained in the accident.
It’s not a popular part of our law, granted, but it’s a necessary one. When you think about it, bars ought to be held to a certain standard when it comes to serving alcohol, a substance known to impair your judgement, reaction times, and motor skills. It only makes sense to have some kind of consequence when a bar abuses their license to sell alcohol and someone gets hurt as a result.
— Grossman Law Offices
