Oregon Injury Lawyer Blog

August 29, 2011

Yamhill Dog Attacks: Brochure Seeks to Limit the Damage

Yamhill County has been considering the question: could your dog become responsible for an Oregon dog attack? The answer, unfortunately, is ‘yes.’

As the Yamhill News-Register notes, “All dogs – from the most muscular guard type to the fluffiest family pet – may bite if frightened, challenged or overexcited.” The paper’s report is a reminder that Portland, Salem or Eugene dog attacks can happen anywhere, at any time. As the article notes, a valued family pet can, believing it is protecting its turf or its owners, attack a family friend or anyone else who enters its familiar areas unexpectedly. The source for the article is a newly-published brochure from Yamhill Dog Control, detailing warning signs and useful tips for keeping one’s pet(s) under control.

The article notes that Yamhill County alone has recorded 61 Oregon dog bites so far this year – a pace that puts the county ahead of last year’s annual total of 98 and even further ahead of the county’s average annual number of Oregon Dog bites over the last seven years: 82.

August 25, 2011

Portland Dram Shop Suit Seeks $7m+ for Drunk Driving Death

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A civil suit filed earlier this month here in Portland is an excellent illustration of Oregon dram shop law and the ways it seeks to protect the public at large and accident victims in particular. According to The Oregonian, the husband of a woman who died in a Portland drunk driving accident last February is suing not only the alleged drunk driver but also two bars which, he claims, served the driver “while he was visibly intoxicated.”

The newspaper goes on to add that “the complaint accuses the bars of negligence for allowing him to drive, failing to determine whether he planned to drive and failing to alert authorities.”

This is practically the definition of a claim under the Oregon dram shop law – a statute that says a bar or alcohol retailer can be held legally responsibly for the damage done by a patron who clearly should not have been served in the first place.

August 22, 2011

Oregon Traumatic Brain Injuries: Retailer Takes a Stand

by Matthew D. Kaplan

In an extraordinary, and welcome, initiative reported last week by the New York Times, the national retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods plans to offer millions of baseline concussion scans to student athletes in an effort to cut down on traumatic brain injuries.

“Through a program it calls Protecting Athletes Through Concussion Education, or PACE, Dick’s will pay for schoolwide neurocognitive testing of athletes across more than 3,300 schools totaling more than a million students,” the paper reports. The goal is to help schools know when athletes have been injured by establishing a baseline against which their brain functions can be compared following a sports-related traumatic brain injury. The idea is to test athletes before their seasons begin.

Having data on “functions like verbal memory, visual memory, and reaction time” collected while a student is healthy will make it easier to determine later on whether injuries, even subtle ones, have altered the way the brain is functioning. The paper notes that the same tests are now routinely administered to professional baseball, football and hockey players.

August 17, 2011

Reexamining Public Policy in the Wake of Oregon Bike Accidents

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A recent fatal cycling accident to our north in Washington State, has prompted some careful thinking concerning the way cyclists are treated by the public policy process. In the wake of this month’s Portland bike accident that landed former star University of Oregon and NFL quarterback Joey Harrington in intensive care, this is clearly an issue that merits attention on both sides of the Columbia River.

A fascinating column published recently in the Seattle Times addresses this issue in the wake of a fatal Washington cycling accident in a busy part of Seattle. Seattle, like Portland, has a reputation for being a cyclist-friendly city. Yet a biker there died late last month while riding in a marked bike lane after an “SUV sped across traffic, slammed into him, and fled,” according to Times columnist Alan Durning.

Durning writes that car crashes killed nearly 1100 people in Idaho, Oregon and Washington during 2009 alone, adding that “car crashes are the No. 1 cause of death among American children and young adults, and the group of pedestrians most in jeopardy is seniors.” As a way of beginning to deal with these problems Durning proposes a simple public policy solution: reduce the regulatory barriers that can make it difficult for municipalities to lower speed limits in critical areas.

August 12, 2011

Oregon Auto Accident Near Seaside Hospitalizes Six

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A near head-on Oregon car accident involving a van and a ambulance led to the hospitalization of six people – one of whom was a patient being transported in the ambulance at the time of the crash, according to The Oregonian.

The newspaper reports that the crash took place near the town of Seaside, Oregon on US-101. The ambulance was headed south in the early hours of the morning “when an oncoming van crossed the centerline.” All six people involved in the Oregon van accident wound up being treated in area hospitals: the driver of the ambulance, the patient in the back and a paramedic who was tending to her, as well as the driver of the van, an adult passenger in the front seat and a five-year-old who was riding in a child seat in the back.

Injuries to the most vulnerable victims – the child and the elderly ambulance patient – were not severe, the paper reports. The van driver and her passenger were the most seriously injured, though their injuries are not believed to be life-threatening, according to the newspaper’s account.

August 8, 2011

Portland Bike Accident Lands Joey Harrington in Intensive Care

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A Portland bike and car crash that could have been a lot worse landed Joey Harrington, the former University of Oregon and NFL quarterback, in the hospital last week with serious, though not life-threatening, injuries. Harrington spent a day in intensive care following the Oregon bike accident according to Fox News.

The Oregonian, citing the Portland police, reports that in the early evening Harrington was biking “westbound on Foster Street when a motorist heading westbound struck Harrington’s rear bicycle wheel.” Harington was wearing a helmet – a fact that his father, speaking to Fox, said probably spared him far more significant injuries. According to The Oregonian the driver of the SUV that struck Harrington remained at the scene of the accident and was later cited by police for “following too close.”

When cars – particularly SUV’s – come into contact with a bicycle on the road the results are almost never good for the cyclist. This is especially important to remember because drivers of larger cars can lose track of just how close they are tracking a cyclist if they do not pay close attention.

August 6, 2011

Salem Wrongful Death Suit Targets City, Fire Department

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The family of a Salem firefighter who killed himself after being offered the choice of resignation or being fired from the department have filed an Oregon wrongful death suit against the city, according to a recent report in the Salem Statesman-Journal. The paper says that his family believes Craig Warren, a 20-year veteran of the city fire department, was neither properly treated by the department’s medical personnel when he began manifesting signs of mental illness, nor was he humanely treated by the department when it decided to discipline and, later, fire him.

“It’s our opinion that the way the city conducted the investigation of Mr. Warren, especially when they became aware that he was having some emotional difficulties, was very cruel,” the paper quotes the family’s attorney as saying. It also quotes city officials declining comment on the grounds that they were still examining the particulars of the Oregon wrongful death lawsuit.

According to the Statesman-Journal, the path to this Salem wrongful death case began when Warren was interviewed three times in 2009 by his departmental commanders and ordered to utilize the department’s employee assistance program, after they noticed that “he was disturbed,” had begun making “inappropriate comments” to colleagues and exhibited a high level of anxiety. At about the same time, the department underwent “a switch in psychiatrists (which) resulted in a medication mistake and Warren was not fully treated,” the paper reports.

July 31, 2011

Child Injured by Alligator at Amusement Park

by Matthew D. Kaplan

In the annals of serious and potentially serious injuries to children this one is as strange as it is frightening. According to the Associated Press, as reprinted in the Chicago Tribune, an 11-year old boy was recently injured at an Indiana amusement park when he “was bitten on the hand by an alligator.”

But wait: it gets stranger. The alligator bit the boy after another guest at the park, using a noose, lifted it out of its pen “and told children they could pet it.” When the animal began biting the man dropped it and ran away, reportedly hopping into a pickup truck along with a woman and four kids, even as he left other children alone with the now-loose animal.

From the standpoint of an Oregon personal injury lawyer with a special interest in injuries to children, where does one begin? Even allowing that the man was breaking the rules by picking up the alligator (not mentioned in the article, but it seems like a fairly safe assumption), what sort of zoo or animal park places potentially dangerous animals – like alligators – in a position where patrons can pick them up in the first place? Granted that someone was able to pick up a gator, one must then ask some tough questions about park security.

July 30, 2011

Oregon Child Injured in Motorcycle Accident

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A young child (his exact age was not released by police) was injured in a Salem motorcycle accident involving a pick-up truck earlier this month, according to Salem-News.com.

I have highlighted the dangers of injuries to Oregon children from ATV accidents in previous blogs. The details of this incident – which involved a dirt bike, rather than an ATV, are, however, a reminder that children far too young to drive can be found operating motorized vehicles and that without the exercise of extreme caution tragedy can result in an instant.

According to the newspaper, the accident began with the boy “riding on dirt trails on his grandparents’ property.” The trail in question was apparently next to the road. Though accompanied by his mother, the child “suddenly drove into the roadway in front of the truck.” The Oregon motorcycle accident took place when the child’s dirt bike was struck by a pick-up truck traveling east on Lakeside Drive in Salem. The paper quotes both witnesses to the Oregon child accident and the driver of the truck telling police that “there was no way for the driver to avoid hitting the child.” The paper reports that there is no indication that the driver was “impaired.”

July 26, 2011

Multi-Car Crash West of Portland Kills One, Seriously Injures Two

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A fatal three-vehicle Oregon car crash near Banks and Glenwood, to the west of Portland, left one person dead and sent two to the hospital with serious injuries, according to an account in The Oregonian.

The fatal Oregon auto crash occurred when “a pickup was headed east on Oregon 6 and near milepost 42, it crossed the center line and collided head-on with” a west-bound car. A short time afterwards another car happened upon the accident, was unable to stop in time to avoid it, and rear-ended the pickup.

The driver of the car involved in the first phase of the accident, a 68-year-old Cloverdale man, was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident, according to the newspaper. The driver and a teenage boy riding with him in the pickup truck were taken to an area hospital with injuries that the paper describes as serious, but not life-threatening. None of the four people – including a child – in the third car were injured.