Missouri Injury Lawyer Blog

As a St. Louis personal injury attorney, I noted a recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about involuntary manslaughter charges that were brought because of a tragic but preventable accident. Yet another young man, 22-year-old Michael Brown of Florissant, has died in a drunk driving accident. The driver, 23-year-old Ronnie Langford of St. Paul, now faces serious criminal charges as a result of the crash.

According to the Post-Dispatch, Brown died from injuries he sustained after he was thrown from Langford’s 2004 Nissan Titan on June 11. Langford was allegedly driving drunk and speeding when he struck a utility pole and then a house in the 1700 block of Koch Road in St. Charles County. The truck flipped after it hit the home’s front deck. Two men were in the home at the time, but neither was injured. Police said that Langford's blood-alcohol content was more than three times the 0.08 percent limit, registering at 0.248 percent when tested. Langford also told police that he knew he should not have been drinking. Langford, who lives on the 700 block of Grandpa's Lane in St. Paul, was jailed in St. Charles County in lieu of $50,000 in bail. He was forbidden to drive or drink alcohol if released.

It's shocking how often people drive when they're drunk, even though it's widely understood that this is dangerous and could hurt or kill others. Many people realize that they could be arrested and charged for driving under the influence of alcohol or, as in Langford's case, involuntary manslaughter. But they may not realize that they may also have to answer in civil court as well -- if they are sued by the loved ones of the victims. Driving when you know perfectly well that you're impaired, and when the dangers of drunk driving are well known, is negligence -- that is, extreme carelessness that could hurt others. Under the law, victims and their families can recover compensation for harm they have suffered from those who hurt them. Victims and their families can sue those who harmed them to recover medical costs, the cost of replacing destroyed property, and lost past and future wages, as well as more intangible harms like pain, suffering, and damage to their relationships and quality of life.

Continue reading "St. Charles Man Faces Manslaughter Charges in Friend’s Drunk Driving Death" »

As a Missouri wrongful death attorney, I have worked with many grieving families whose loved ones have been taken from them, and I know how devastating the loss of a family member is. That’s why I was sorry to read that a Branson man has been charged with manslaughter in the deaths of two young women. Michael Green, 25, was allegedly drunk when he crashed his car just west of Branson, killing Nicole Porter, 25, and Jessica Jenkins, 24. Green has been charged with a Class B felony for killing both women while driving under the influence of alcohol, with a BAC of .18% or more.

On the night of Monday, Sept. 27, prosecutors say that Green was driving his Pontiac sports car too fast and down the wrong side of the road on Highway 248. He ran a stop sign at Branson Hills Parkway and his car hit a rock embankment and caught fire. Porter and Jenkins were passengers in his car. Both women were taken to hospitals -- Jenkins to one in Branson, and Porter to one in Springfield. Sadly, both women died. The Western Taney County Fire District photographed the wrecked car. Police took a blood sample from Green at the scene of the accident.

Jenkins' sister, Brittany Halstead, 20, said that Jenkins had offered to drive so that Green would not have to. Medical personnel at the Branson hospital where Jenkins died that night told the family that Jenkins had no alcohol or drugs in her system. Jenkins was an organ donor, and her family hopes that people will learn from their tragedy. Jenkins's mother told her daughters' friends how much pain she was in, and Halstead told them, "Let this be a lesson. Do not drink and drive and do not get in the vehicle if the driver is drunk because it's the innocent that suffer."

It's especially sad to me as a St. Louis auto accident attorney to know that this accident could have been prevented if Green had allowed Jenkins to drive. Driving drunk and refusing to allow an unimpaired driver to take the wheel are well beyond the boundaries of responsible behavior -- in fact, they're good examples of the kind of negligence that is an issue in my cases. If Green is convicted of the criminal charges he faces, he will be sentenced for breaking the law. But he may also face lawsuits from the Porter and Jenkins families for taking their daughters away from them. When someone behaves negligently and hurts someone else, the negligent person can be required to pay for the harm that they caused. Even with court cases, families of car crash victims will never get their loved ones back, and their lives will never be the same. But through wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits, they can hold drivers responsible for the emotional -- and sometimes financial -- consequences of their actions.

Continue reading "Alleged Drunk Driver Charged With DUI Manslaughter in Passengers’ Deaths" »

As a Missouri car crash attorney, I have been carefully following the news about Toyota and other carmakers that have recalled their vehicles for serious safety defects. Given the lawsuits mounting against Toyota, I was dismayed to see recent articles reporting that rental car companies are not required to fix recalled safety defects in their cars before renting them out. Despite being ordered to pay $15 million in a recent lawsuit involving two deaths, Enterprise Rent-A-Car has said that it may not immediately fix cars whose recalls it does not regard as pressing.

This isn't the first time Enterprise has been in the news for cutting corners on customer safety. Last year, Enterprise was discovered to have ordered about 66,000 Chevy Impalas without their standard side airbags in order to save money. Then the company advertised the cars for sale as if they did have the airbags, misleading customers who expected that the cars had all their standard safety features. The more recent defective rental car issue gained attention from a tragic case involving the deaths of two sisters. Jacqueline Houck, 20, and her sister, Raechel, 24, rented a Chrysler PT Cruiser from a California Enterprise Rent-A-Car in 2004 so that they could visit family near Los Angeles. The PT Cruiser had been recalled a month before the crash because of a broken power steering hose that posed a fire hazard. While the Houck sisters were driving, a fire broke out under the hood. They lost control of the car, hit a semi-trailer and died.

Consumer advocates including the Houck sisters' mother, Carol Houck, have petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to forbid rental car companies from continuing to rent out defective cars. They have said it's deceptive to rent out a car that customers should be able to assume is safe, when the company knows that there are recalls associated with the car. If someone chooses not to take their personal car in to have a recalled defect repaired right away, they are aware of the car's defect and have chosen to drive it anyway. But a defective rental car is a different situation. The customer rents a car expecting that they're paying for the use of a safe, functional vehicle, but only the rental car company knows whether this is really true.

In my view as a St. Louis auto accident attorney, it is disturbing that Enterprise does not see every safety recall as “pressing.” If the defect was serious enough to merit a recall, it should be serious enough to fix before renting the car to a customer who has no reason to think there is anything wrong with it. It's easy to see why rental car companies don't want to immediately fix cars when they learn about recalls: money. If they have to pull some of their cars out of circulation when a recall is announced, those cars will not be bringing in rental fees while they're in the shop. From the company's perspective, it's easier and cheaper to pull the cars out of circulation when it's convenient for the company. But this way of looking at it puts consumer and driver safety at the bottom of the list, which is the opposite of where it belongs. It shouldn't be up to victims and their families alone to deal with the financial and health consequences of accidents that negligent car rental companies failed to prevent.

Continue reading "Rental Car Companies Put Unwitting Customers’ Lives at Risk With Defective Cars" »

It's every parent's nightmare: sending your children off with their friends on a school-related trip, only to hear later that the school buses have crashed. As a St. Louis bus accident attorney, I was disturbed to learn of a horrible accident like this right here in Missouri, in which a student was killed and several others suffered serious injuries in a crash with a large truck and a pickup. Also killed was the 19-year-old driver of the pickup. Initial reports put at least some blame on the bus drivers. My sympathies go to the families of those killed, and I wish those who were injured a speedy recovery.

Band members from John F. Hodge High School in St. James, Mo., were on two school buses making their way to Six Flags St. Louis when the buses crashed into slowed traffic and each other. Danie Klein, 14, was sitting at the back of the first bus. She suffered two broken vertebrae and a fractured skull. Luckily, her doctors say she escaped neurological or brain damage. Her best friend, Jessica Brinker, 15, was sitting next to her, and tragically, Jessica was killed. Emily Perona, 16, sat in the second-to-last row of the bus, right in front of Danie and Jessica. When the second school bus smashed into the one she was riding, Emily was thrown into the air and pinned against the seat in front of her, breaking her pelvis, cutting her skin, and possibly injuring her neck. Another 54 students were treated for minor injuries. Daniel Schatz, 19, of Sullivan, was driving another vehicle involved in the crash, and sadly, he was killed as well.

The accident occurred as traffic slowed for a work zone on Interstate 44 in Gray Summit, Mo., about 40 miles from St. Louis. Michael D. Crabtree, of Kearneysville, W.Va., was driving a semi cab without a trailer. Crabtree slowed for the road construction and was rear-ended by a pickup truck driven by Schatz. Then Schatz's truck was rear-ended by a school bus driven by 75-year-old Katherine P. Shackelford, of St. James. A second school bus driven by Kelly M. McEnnis-Mullenix, 38, hit the first one. Schatz's truck was pushed on top of Crabtree's cab, and Shackelford's bus was pushed on top of both of those vehicles. The Missouri Highway Patrol told the newspaper that nothing was off the table this soon after the crash, but an initial report did not blame the truck driver, Crabtree. Rather, it said bus driver Shackelford was "inattentive" and her colleague, McEnnis-Mullenix, was following too closely.

We'd all like to think that those who drive our children will use particular caution, so it's particularly disturbing to read that the drivers of the school buses were allegedly failing to exercise the most basic level of care that we expect of all drivers. Large vehicles like school buses are heavy and require plenty of stopping distance. Failing to pay sufficient attention to traffic conditions and following too closely can and does cause serious, but completely preventable, accidents. Drivers of school buses should be especially careful about maintaining enough stopping distance between their vehicle and the ones in front of them because many school buses do not have seat belts. Stopping suddenly, or crashing, can be especially dangerous when young passengers do not have safety belts to help protect them.

In my experience as a Missouri bus crash lawyer, accidents like this can impose high financial and emotional costs on victims and their families. Treatment for the children who were injured will be lengthy and very expensive. Victims may need special tutoring to help them keep up with schoolwork during recovery, and they will lose out on participating in sports and other activities that they had looked forward to as the school year's start approaches. Their parents may lose income while making sure they get the medical treatment they need. The families who lost loved ones will have to deal with funeral expenses and emotional devastation. The law recognizes that victims should not have to pay for all these costs themselves if they were not at fault for their injuries.

In cases where government entities like school districts may be at fault, a lawsuit to recover compensation can be complicated. Government entities have "sovereign immunity," meaning that they are exempt from lawsuits. In Missouri, sovereign immunity does not extend to government employees' negligence in operating motor vehicles, but there are caps and restrictions on the amount and kind of compensation victims can receive from public entities. This is why victims of crashes like this one need an experienced southern Illinois bus wreck attorney who knows how to handle these complex areas of law.

Continue reading "School Bus Crash With Semi Truck Blamed on Negligence of Several Drivers" »

As a St. Louis personal injury lawyer, I noted a recent news report that a 16-year-old girl's death in the adolescent psychiatric ward of SSM DePaul Health Center in Bridgeton was ruled a homicide. State and federal regulators had already warned the hospital to correct its alarming series of lapses in patient safety. The hospital apparently failed to live up to its moral and legal obligations to provide enough well-trained staff to care for all of its patients. The tragic result may have been the death of Alexis Evette Richie, who had reportedly been verbally and physically abused by staff members.

Alexis had been in foster care for nine years and was often in emotional turmoil that led to acting out. She was admitted to DePaul after stabbing a teacher at Evangelical Children's Home with a pencil on October 16, 2009. She died in the hospital ten days later. The day of her death, she reportedly verbally abused and physically attacked DePaul staff members after she was told that it was time to go to bed, and was threatened with a tranquilizer when she did not comply. To restrain her, staff members held her facedown in a beanbag chair while a nurse administered shots of Geodon (ziprasidone), an antipsychotic, and Ativan (lorazepam), an anti-anxiety drug. Then the nurse left. Alexis reportedly went limp, so the aides left her facedown in the beanbag chair. Finally, the charge nurse checked on Alexis and found her unresponsive and soaked in her own urine, with a weak pulse, no reflexes and fixed pupils.

The charge nurse did not begin CPR, and nurses even told an aide not to begin CPR because there was no breathing mask. The aide started CPR anyway, 12 minutes after the charge nurse discovered Alexis's condition. Nine minutes later, a doctor put a breathing tube down Alexis's throat, and an emergency team tried to restart her heart, but soon after, she was pronounced dead. An autopsy showed that she died from being sedated and suffocated by the beanbag chair. Leaving Alexis for 12 minutes after she stopped moving was cited as a serious problem in investigations by both the state health inspector and the Children's Division of the Missouri Department of Social Services. The Children's Division also charged the aides and the nurse who administered the shots with child neglect, since Alexis had been a ward of the state. Alexis's biological parents have hired an attorney to investigate the case as well.

In my view as a Missouri wrongful death attorney, cases like Alexis's demonstrate what can go wrong when hospital staff are poorly trained, ill-supervised, and spread too thin. State and federal regulators had warned DePaul two years earlier to pay more attention to patient safety after learning about other patients' deaths after being restrained and secluded -- deaths that DePaul failed to report to the authorities, as is legally required. A nurse said that the hospital was short-staffed because of budget cuts, so patients in seclusion and restraint weren't being monitored constantly, also as legally required. And in Alexis's case, nurses told police that they didn't even know why they didn't start CPR on Alexis as soon as they discovered her condition.

Patients who enter a hospital do so expecting to get better, not to be neglected and abused. All patients, including foster children with no one to stand up for them, should be able to expect that hospitals will adhere to basic standards of care. Federal and state regulators do their best to ensure that hospitals meet their responsibilities, but as DePaul's case demonstrates, when hospitals keep regulators in the dark about their problems, regulators can't always address the problems. Unfortunately, patients and their families are the ones who experience the consequences of these failings. A southern Illinois personal injury attorney can help these victims fight back, holding negligent hospitals responsible for their careless conduct. It's important for families of victims killed by a hospital staff's carelessness to contact a lawyer immediately, since wrongful death lawsuits must be filed within as little as 30 days after families learn about the incident.

Continue reading "St. Louis-Area Hospital Allegedly Negligent in 16-Year-Old Girl's Suffocation Death" »

A man in his forties had to be rescued by firefighters March 5 when he unexpectedly fell through a manhole cover in northern St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch reported. According to the article, the man was walking through an alley near Cavalry Cemetery when he plunged 15 feet into the sewer and was trapped. It was unclear how he fell, but firefighters found the manhole cover in the sewer with him, suggesting that the cover slipped or broke. He was taken to the hospital for examination.

Accidents with holes in the street don’t happen nearly as often as auto accidents in Missouri, but they may be more common than you think. As the article notes, a similar accident happened in St. Louis recently when a woman fell through a chute outside an abandoned high school and ended up with hypothermia from waiting for rescue in four feet of standing water. And in New York, a woman fell through a sidewalk grating in May of 2007, landing ten feet below in an electric transformer.

These underground facilities are typically established and maintained by government agencies or utility companies. They, and their employees, are entrusted with the public’s safety when they are authorized to open and close these holes in the street. Naturally, pedestrians must take reasonable care to avoid obvious hazards -- but utility and municipal workers must also take reasonable care to avoid creating hazards. That’s especially true for hidden hazards that only look safe, as the manhole cover in this case may have been.

People who are seriously hurt by an organization’s carelessness, or inaction on a serious danger, have the right to hold that organization responsible for any harm it causes. In a St. Louis personal injury lawsuit, victims can win back all of the costs caused by the accident, including their medical bills; lost wages for time they were forced to take off work; and compensation for a serious disability, pain and emotional suffering. However, suing a government agency can be difficult, involving complicated rules and very tight deadlines. To maximize your chances of success, experts recommend that you speak to a Missouri personal injury attorney as soon as possible after your accident.

The Lowe Law Firm can help. If you or someone you love has been hurt through someone else’s carelessness in Missouri or southern Illinois, and you’d like to learn more, please contact us through our Web site or call 1-877-678-3400 to arrange a free consultation.

Last week, the parents of a 14-month-old patient who died in a medical helicopter crash filed suit against the companies that operated the helicopter as well as the pilot, the Chicago Tribune reports.

The accident happened on Oct. 15, 2008. A Bell 222 helicopter was flying Kristin Reann Blockinger to Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago when it hit a radio-tower support wire and crashed. In addition to Kristin Reann, three crew members also died in the accident. The helicopter was operated by Air Angels of Bolingbrook and Reach Medical Holdings.

The parents, Robert and Brooke, filed their negligence lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against Air Angels, Reach Medical Holdings and the helicopter pilot. They allege that the defendants failed to follow safety practices recommended by the Federal Aviation Administration such as assigning two pilots to flights, supplying night-vision goggles and advanced training and equipping the helicopters with terrain-awareness systems.

Failing to follow best practices can be a tragic mistake.

At The Lowe Law Firm, our attorneys have handled similar cases involving failure to follow safety procedures. In 2003, a $13.5 million verdict was upheld on appeal in a case where a boxer suffered brain damage due to the failure to have an ambulance at the match.

If you have been hurt or someone you love has been hurt or killed as a result of another’s carelessness, please contact our attorneys today by calling 877-678-3400 or by filling out our online contact form.