Articles Posted in Wrongful Death

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On Friday General Motors announced yet another expansion of the widening recall of its small cars. According to the New York Times, the company “is expanding its ignition-switch recall to include an additional 971,000 small cars worldwide, including 824,000 in the United States, that may have been previously repaired with defective switches.”

As I noted in a post earlier this month, well before today’s announcement GM had already recalled more than a million cars built since the 2003 model year because of a defect that may lead the ignition switch to cut off. That, in turn, could mean that air bags fail to deploy in the event of a crash. As the latest developments indicate it is now clear that many cars had the faulty switches added to them when they went in for repairs.

More disturbing, however, are the continuing revelations about the way in which GM has handled this scandal. In a move that may yet lead to wrongful death lawsuits, company documents have shown that GM misled grieving families for years, telling those who had lost loved-one in crashes linked to the flaw “that it did not have enough evidence of any defect in their cars, interviews letters and legal documents show.” This happened even as the company was internally debating the best way to fix the problem, the newspaper reports.

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Yesterday’s announcement that Toyota has reached a settlement with the Justice Department was striking on several accounts. First there is the settlement’s sheer size. “Toyota will pay a $1.2 billion penalty to settle the criminal probe into its handling of unintended acceleration problems that led to recalls of 8.1 million vehicles beginning in 2009,” according to an account in USA Today.

The paper adds: “the federal criminal probe… was independent of federal safety regulator and congressional probes of the Toyota sudden-acceleration recalls. It looked at whether Toyota provided false or incomplete statements to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration in the events leading to recalls for floor mats that could trap gas pedals and gas pedals that could stick… Toyota already paid two federal fines of $16.375 million in 2010 for delays in reporting the floor mat and pedal defects, and another $17.35 million in 2012 related to an additional mat recall.”

As the paper goes on to report, the problem first came to public attention in 2009 “with a rash of runaway car reports.” Five deaths have been directly linked to the problem, but the larger issue – and the one that Toyota must continue to deal with – is evidence that the company knew about these problems but covered them up.

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A disturbing article published this week in the New York Times outlines a series of failures by both corporate America and the federal government. Its focus is General Motors’ recent recall notices involving well over a million vehicles manufactured since the 2003 model year (click here for GM’s latest news release with full details of models and years effected). The vehicles have a defect in the air bag system that in some instances means the air bags will not deploy during a crash because the ignition switch has been cut off.

According to the Times, GM now acknowledges that at least 13 deaths can be tied to the defect. What is disturbing is the paper’s report that the automaker’s engineers were aware of the issue in 2004 – more than a year before the first of those 13 documented deaths. Equally bad is the record of federal regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to the paper, “after two of the (Chevy) Cobalt crashes, the regulators took a close look at the cause, each time raising the possibility of a defect. They also met with GM about the issue. But despite the red flags, they never opened a broader investigation into whether the car was defective.”

As the paper goes on to report, a number of lawsuits related to the documented deaths have already made their way through the court system. Class action law was created precisely to enable ordinary Americans to defend their rights in cases of this sort of willful and negligent misconduct, especially when it results in wrongful deaths. The recall notices are still new and are still sinking in for many people (the initial recall was issued on February 19 and was later extended to hundreds of thousands of other vehicles) so it is also important to note that the full impact of the situation is not yet clear. It is clear that the court system will probably hear much more about these vehicles in the months and years to come.

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Following up a story I wrote about earlier this month, the Associated Press reports that Washington State officials “are revoking the operating license of a Washington retirement facility after an 88-year-old woman froze to death in its courtyard earlier this month.”

In the weeks since the incident new details have emerged regarding this tragedy, none of which reflect well on the retirement home and care center and all of which reinforce the idea that what happened may qualify, legally speaking, as a wrongful death under Washington law. This terrible state of affairs is made worse by the emotional harm to the victim’s family the retirement home reportedly caused by issuing misleading information to them in the hours after the woman’s body was discovered (the family was initially told only that she died of a heart attack and the role of exposure in her death was not mentioned, according to the reports cited in my earlier post).

We now know, according to AP, that the victim’s body “was found in an enclosed, open-air courtyard after staff missed a required hourly bed check at midnight. The news agency cites officials from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services saying that “staff mistakes and ineffective security measures… are to blame” for the death. With its license now revoked the center “can continue to care for its current 57 residents while an appeal takes place, but it can’t accept new patients,” AP reports. It adds: “officials said some safety hazards remained uncorrected three days after” the woman died.

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The death of an 88-year-old Longview woman last week has raised Washington wrongful death questions and serves as a tragic reminder of the high level of responsibility we rightly expect when placing loved ones in a professional care facility.

According to the (Longview) Daily News, the elderly woman “froze to death in the outdoor courtyard of her Alzheimer’s care center.” The paper quotes the woman’s daughter saying that the doors to the facility’s courtyard were unlocked late at night, despite the obvious danger this posed to patients. Washington State’s Department of Health and Human Services is reported to be investigating the incident.

The paper reports that a spokesperson for the facility “could not comment on policies… regarding access to the enclosed courtyard at night or in cold weather.” It is notable, however, that the victim’s daughter says her mother “had fallen out in the courtyard twice before and also was known to move around a lot at night.” Equally troubling are claims that the family was initially led about the cause of the woman’s death – being told she died of a heart attack without her exposure to the cold weather being mentioned.

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Northwest Cable News reported earlier this month on a tragic Washington dog attack story. “A week after she was attacked by pit bulls, a 65-year-old woman has died at a local hospital,” according to the cable news channel. The victim’s husband told the station he believes “the injuries from the attack triggered an underlying heart condition.”

According to NWCN, citing a report from Seattle TV station KING, the woman was attacked by two pit bulls while taking a walk near her home. The channel reports that bystanders helped pull the dogs off her and called for medical care. The animals were later destroyed.

Though the Pierce County, Washington Medical Examiner lists the cause of the woman’s death as “heart attack, injuries to the body and dog bites” the woman’s husband may be correct in believing that the dog attack was the key event triggering her subsequent heart attack. In my opinion, as a Washington and Oregon wrongful death attorney, legal questions surrounding this incident are likely to turn on the professional opinions of the doctors who treated the victim.

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The 2009 death of an Oregon-bound family on a California freeway led this week to an important wrongful death ruling by a court in our neighbor to the south. As reported by the Los Angeles Times a 13-year-old girl is now the only survivor of her family’s SUV accident. The family car hit the rear of an illegally parked truck near La Crescenta, California while on its way to Oregon for a Thanksgiving vacation.

According to the newspaper the truck’s driver was parked “in an area designated for emergencies only without his trailer lights or emergency reflectors on… (the driver’s) attorney argued at trial that his client had pulled over to the side of the road to take medication for a severe headache, which constituted an emergency.” The victim’s attorney, however, pointed out that the driver had given conflicting versions of the incident at different times, “including stopping to urinate and pulling over to sleep,” the Times reports.

When the family SUV burst into flames the teenage girl and her elder brother managed to reach safety but their parents and another brother were not able to get away from the burning car. The newspaper notes that the surviving brother “committed suicide in June, four days before his mother’s birthday,” a fact that highlights in the worst way imaginable the intense psychological trauma these two children have gone through.

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The case of a 15-year-old Vancouver boy who drowned last year while attending a church-run summer camp may soon be headed to court. Today’s Oregonian reports that the victim’s estate has filed a $13 million lawsuit against the camp and its organizers.

According to the paper, the boy died just over a year ago when he fell while walking behind the waterfall at White River Falls, near Maupin. A 26-year old counselor also drowned in the incident when he dove into the water in an attempt to save the boy.

Looking at this incident from a legal perspective a number of negligence issues arise and significant questions of responsibility. It is worth remembering that 15-year-olds are still children and require trained adult supervision when in an environment like a summer camp. The reports that the boy had been encouraged by the camp organizers to walk behind the waterfall are potentially very serious, and, if confirmed, they could be evidence of highly irresponsible behavior on the part of the camp’s organizers. At a very basic level, the fact that, based on the media reports, no one on the outing seems to have been wearing a life preserver or to have had any other life-saving gear on hand is deeply troubling.

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Even as police investigate the death last week of a 33-year-old man outside a Northeast Portland strip club the circumstances surrounding the incident have raised serious questions about how well the club was handling its security arrangements – questions that could eventually expose the club to an Oregon wrongful death claim.

As The Oregonian reported last week, the man “collapsed on the sidewalk outside the club and died from a single gunshot wound to the head.” A 21-year-old woman was also injured in the Portland shooting incident and was treated at an area hospital.

“The homicide marked the second fatal shooting at the location in two years. An inspector from the Oregon Liquor Control Commission has launched an investigation with Portland police to see if alcohol service played any role in the shooting,” the newspaper notes, citing a spokeswoman for the commission.

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Late Friday night a Southeast Portland man working as a cleaner at a meat processing plant in Clackamas died after falling into a piece of machinery, according to The Oregonian. The details of this Oregon Industrial Accident case are disturbing and will merit close scrutiny in the months to come.

According to the newspaper, paramedics and the Clackamas County sheriff’s office were called just before midnight on Friday and arrived at the facility to find the victim “entangled in a blender, which regulates the fat content of ground meat. The following day firefighters returned to help dismantle the machinery” and to remove the 41-yesr-old man’s body.

From a legal perspective there are two key elements to this sad story. First, the long and unsettling safety record of the factory in question. The Oregonian reports that this facility “was the target of a consumer alert in 2007, when potentially deadly E. Coli bacteria was traced” to ground beef processed at the plant. More recently – last October, to be precise – the plant was cited by the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division after inspectors found “that machinery in the meat-grinding room wasn’t properly locked down during cleaning. (The) inspector said an ‘unexpected start-up of the machine ‘ could cause injuries.” Oregon Occupational Safety and Health regulations are both clear and strict where situations like this are concerned. State regulations require what are known as “Lockout/Tagout” procedures around dangerous machinery to insure worker safety. According to an OSHA document “the standard requires that physical lockout be utilized for equipment or machines which have energy isolating devices capable of being locked out, except when the employer can demonstrate that utilization of a physical tagout system provides full employee protection.” In plain English: the potentially dangerous machine must either be locked-up in a manner that keeps workers from getting to it, or the workers have to be working in teams that allow them to keep track of one another. It will be up to investigators and the courts to decide whether the employer met that standard in this case.

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