L.A. jury awards $150 million to 13-year-old girl

In My Humble Opinion
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L.A. jury awards $150 million to 13-year-old girl whose family died in freeway crash

Kylie Asam was 9 when she and her 11-year-old brother, Blaine, managed to escape from their family’s mangled SUV after it struck and got caught under a big rig parked on the shoulder of Interstate 210 nearly four years ago. They saw their parents and older brother get burned alive after the vehicle they were trapped in caught fire.

This is tragic on a scale I can barely comprehend.

That said, why the hell should the trucking company be held liable? My most primary and basic rule to obey as a driver is DON’T HIT ANYTHING. It couldn’t be simpler, it couldn’t be more obvious. Self preservation alone should cover it, but virtually all traffic laws are designed to keep us from colliding with each other.

I understand that the truck wasn’t supposed to park on the side of the road, but he did.
We don’t live in a perfect world. If I drive down the road and find a flock of sheep or turkeys in the road, I don’t plow through them. I have to deal with reality, not what “should” be.

The jury agreed that Asam’s father also was negligent, but determined his actions were not a substantial factor in causing his family’s deaths.

I just don’t understand this position. The father had a steering wheel in his hand. He is the one who controls the direction and speed of his vehicle. I have lost an engine in my airplane and had to set it down. I didn’t just point to the fucking ground. I had to find a suitable spot to land where I wouldn’t hit anything.

The father hit something in the road. He wanted to stop and inspect his van. This doesn’t require a full-blown, run-for-the-hills dive to the emergency lane. You guide your vehicle on a safe path to the side of the road if it’s there and clear. I know it was night, and the truck not lit up. I have a solution for this on my cars. They’re called headlights, and they help me see what is up ahead in the darkness.

It doesn’t matter if you’re downtown, on a country road, or anywhere - your job is to look ahead of you and not hit what’s ahead of you.

I think this verdict was reached based on emotion, and the knowledge of deep pockets to pay crying children, not on a logical discussion of the rules of driving.

Yes, the trucker should have left his lights on, but I’m not sure how much that would have helped. I haven’t seen the scene, or read the full investigation, nor spoken with witnesses.

I would hold him partially responsible, but maybe 25% max, with the other 75% on dad. Given the limited information in the linked story, I think Dad deserves the majority of the blame, not the trucker.

YMMV.

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I’d imagine that just like in almost EVERY other case where a jury awards some ridiculously huge award, that the judge will step in and hack it down to something more reasonable.

(and yes, this did happen in Liebeck vs. McDonald’s, FYI).

Or, just as likely, the trucking company won’t be able to pay, so it’s just a meaningless award.

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I see this as a successful sympathy play on the jury by the attorney. Of course the father was primarily at fault, of course he could have left for the family trip in daylight, of course he could have paid better attention to the road ahead and seen the truck parked - but LOOK AT HER! SHE’S ONLY 13 AND HER WHOLE FAMILY IS DEAD!!! DEAD I TELL YOU, DEAD DEAD DEAD!!!

Would this jury verdict had been the same if the car was filled with laborers traveling to a project and the only survivor was one 47 year old Hispanic Male? I think not.

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The claim is that the truck was parked illegally with no lights on, and that the father driving the SUV had struck something in the road and was trying to pull over and he couldn’t have seen the truck. The amount is ridiculous and likely to be reduced. It isn’t a great system though.

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How much would you like to wager that the defense team never offered a reasonable settlement amount to avoid this possibility?

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With these kinds of things, I always assume it’s some combination of a) juries being retarded, and b) the media (CBS here) leaves out some fact that makes the decision now seem more reasonable, if not necessarily clear-cut.

Like with Liebeck. The media reported it as “dumbass suing McDonald’s because she spilled coffee and didn’t realize that it was hot.” It was not so clear though, and many facts were misreported.

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It’s about her parents, not her parrots ! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m actually not having a problem with the majority of the blame being on the truck driver. I get that the father should have been paying attention to where he was going no matter how much of an emergency he believed the struck debris to be. But had the truck not been somewhere it was not supposed to be (in apparent violation of rules for truckers and rules of the road), the damage that occurred to the victims’ vehicle would almost certainly not have happened. The fire probably wouldn’t have happened, in the first place. And, apparently, the way the doors were crumpled prevented good samaritans from being able to open them and free the trapped occupants (at least some of whom were still alive while the fire grew and eventually consumed them). IANAL, but I think this relates to proximate cause.

At any rate, I am finding it difficult to believe that the truck was easily visible even with headlights. Reports state that there were no skid marks at the scene, so unless the man had his head completely turned around the entire time he was merging to the right, he somehow managed to NEVER see a very large object that was sitting right in front of him (assuming that there were no blind corners or any such thing, but I’d guess that one of the stories would have mentioned it had that been a factor). How is that possible?

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Couple of stories from my driving days. I used to drive a truck like this.
Solid white, company logo on door.
I was in the right of two left turn lanes, light changes, I move through the turn. Part way through, jackass in left lane(next to me) decides the driver in front of him is too slow, changes lanes into me. Claims he never saw the truck.

Same truck, two years later. Waiting at a light, fuel pump fails. I line up the triangles behind the truck and put on the flashers. Police show up while I’m waiting for a tow, parks his cruiser about 60 ft. back of the last triangle with his pursuit lights flashing.
Idiot pulls up behind cruiser, waits a couple of minutes, swings around cruiser, runs over the triangles and plows into the back of my truck. Didn’t see it.

Neither one was drunk, either.

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The truck in this accident was white too, for what it’s worth: video link

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So he hit whatever in the road, closed his eyes and hung a sharp right?

Was it pea soup fog out? Did he not have headlights? Was he wearing seriously dark shades at night?

Sorry, if I had been on the jury, I would not have gone so overboard in awards - I am not sure exactly how I would have justified so much against the truck company and so little against the father for not driving responsibly.

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Personally I don’t see enough info in the article to make a decision on whether the jury was being reasonable. As a juror - you are given instructions. They will be things like “A person in not considered liable if blah blah blah”. For all I know - violating the law in and of itself might be presumptive or something like that. It isn’t like they just let the jurors back there in the back and “well have at it - do what you think is fair”.

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I’m just saying that the jury may not have been operating on emotion alone. I don’t know what either side in the case presented in court, maybe it was an awful defense and a reasonable person would find the same way that they did. If the truck was parked illegally and the SUV actually hit something then the driver had a right to pull over, and if the conditions made it difficult enough to see the truck then the driver or truck owner should be responsible. Short of more specific information I’m just saying that that it’s possible the jury came to a reasonable decision, I’m not saying that they actually did. I have no argument with you about the amount of the award, and I don’t like the way this system works either.

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I wouldn’t bring up parrots if I were you…

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In the video on one of the links at 1:45 they have a shot of the scene that looks like the truck really didn’t have any further it could have pulled over and the shots of the SUV look like it hit that truck at speed, The SUV was totally mauled by the impact.

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That’s my initial reaction as well. The SUV is a long way under the truck - I would like to know the estimated speed it was travelling at.

On the lack of skid marks - how many cars don’t have ABS now? The lack of skid marks doesn’t tell much at all.

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California is legally insane.

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So what? The misreported facts which are detailed in your link are irrelevant. Stupid behavior is still stupid behavior—and McDonalds shouldn’t be held responsible for a woman who spills coffee on her own crotch.

Yes, McDonalds served its coffee at 180 degrees instead of the lower temperatures used- for safety reasons- by others restaurants. But that doesnt excuse the stupidity of the woman who burned herself.
Everybody knows that coffee is hot. Everybody knows that at home , when you boil water for your teabag, or your soup or, your spaghetti, or yes, even your instant coffee----the boiling water is hot.

Nobody says to herself, “gee whiz, I wish I was at McDonalds and not in my own kitchen, because I know I’m safer at McDonalds. They know how to boil water at less than 212 degrees Farenheit! In fact, it’s so safe that I’ll take my baby behind the counter and put his hands on the grill there, because it won’t be as hot as the stove in my house. I don’t need to be a responsible adult and think about safety,–no never… So I can’t get get hurt by anything hot at McDonalds, either.”

The same logic should apply to the OP’s case of a truck parked on the side of the road. It’s a road, for Og’s sake. Sometimes there are things on the side of roads-- dead squirrels, blocks of wood, and even parked trucks. It doesnt matter if the parked truck was on the shoulder legally or not. The truck didn’t kill anybody. The driver of the SUV killed people by slamming intothe truck at a speed much too high for a responsible driver to be swerving onto the shoulder of a road, at any time.

Stupid behavior is stupid behavior. The results were tragic, of course. But that’s no reason to blame someone else for your own stupidity --whether driving, or drinking coffee.

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A friend who’s a lawyer was telling me once about a class he took in law school about Juries. They read lots of interviews with jurors who were involved in this sort of verdict and he said the quote that kept coming up over and over again was, “They won the lottery!”

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But then you add not-boiling water or milk, or leave it to cool, so that it won’t give your face third degree burns when you try to drink it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to buy a cup of coffee expecting it to be safe for human consumption.