Yes, hypothetical. If this had happened to me personally, I’d be talking to my insurance company. And it’s probably a case that varies from state to state. Anyway. . .
Recently there was an accident near my residence. Tragic story, guy driving in the pouring rain, loses control, goes off the road, truck overturns on someone’s porch. Driver dead at the scene.
Is the insurance company still liable for a settlement on the totaled vehicle since the (presumed) owner is dead?
The residence sustained some porch damage. In such a case, would the “proper” procedure be to file it with the homeowner’s insurance, and have them get it from the driver’s vehicle insurance, or would the homeowner’s insurance company be left out of the loop?
As to the second question, that would be at the discretion of the homeowner. If the homeowner’s insurance pays the claim, they indeed could subrogate and go after the driver’s insurance.
If the guy died accidentally(stroke, for instance) and then wrecked, he is not liable as the damage to the porch did not result from a conscious decision he’d made. Porch owner has to go through his homeowner’s insurance.
If he died on purpose (suicide or intentionally crashed for no good reason), then he would be liable but his insurance might not pay for the porch OR the car because both would be foreseeable results of self-inflicted death while driving, and insurance doesn’t pay for intentional acts.
Long and short: owner of the porch can pursue the claim through the driver’s insurance and will be compensated as long as he wasn’t dead before the wreck started (heart attack), and the wreck was accidental.
This seems quite strange. The driver certainly made conscious decisions: every driving decision before he died which may have been only seconds before the crash. By the logic here, if I slide off a bridge in the winter and land on a car going under, is my insurance not liable as the proximate cause of the damage, my car falling, was not a conscious decision on my part?
Fair enough point. Foreseeability is everything. If you take an action that can reasonably be expected to result in a crash, then you have behaved negligently and are thus responsible for the resulting damage. It is presumed nobody has a stroke on purpose or can even control when they’ll have one. As the result is typically a loss of consciousness or sudden and severe mental impairment, you really can’t blame them for what follows. If the loss of consciousness is caused by, say, suddenly feeling the effects of a guzzled pint of vodka, or driving while fatigued and then falling asleep, there is a solid argument to be made that you failed to act appropriately: you could have called a cab or gotten to a parking area and got a nap, etc.
If you slide off a bridge, there will be a presumption that you were driving too fast for conditions and so, yes, it’d be your fault. Even in this case, however, if there is a good argument that the ice was unexpected (say it’s a rainy May evening and a truck spilled a bunch of liquid nitrogen on the road…) then you get to call it a “sudden emergency” and you might be all or partially off the hook for what happens next.