3 years ago this month, my father had what turned out to be his fatal stroke in the living room, thankfully before he got behind the wheel because he and my mother were talking about going somewhere later in the day.
There’s also an old fire station in my town with Tyvek covering part of one wall, a year or two after a woman had a medical incident similar to your mother. They were actually in the process of building a new station and relocating it up the road when this happened; they just haven’t figured out what to do with the building.
Hugs to you. That had to have been a tough thing to learn about.
Could it be that she wanted to catnap in her vehicle, and so put up the sunshade — and maybe switched on the heat, because it was kind of chilly — and one of the kids put the truck in gear, and then she did the best she could while disoriented and unable to see?
Every single state that has no-fault coverage handles it differently, and the trend has been to further reduce the coverage due to skyrocketing increases in medical expenses.
My P&C license is lapsed, and I wasn’t licensed in KS anyway, but by a quick perusal of the laws for the state, each person hit would make a claim first to their own PIP coverage, and after that would make a liability claim to the driver’s insurance.
Since the minimum in KS is only $4.5k in medical expenses (!) odds are great that pretty much everyone involved is going to apply to the driver’s coverage immediately. And it’ll almost certainly max out far below costs, since the minimum is $25,000 in bodily injury per person, $50,000 max per accident. With fatalities, even if they carry a reasonable amount of coverage (say a 100/300 or more) they’re still likely screwed.
That is with the current assumptions that this was accidental or a medical emergency - if (!) it turned out to be some sort of deliberate action, the driver’s coverage won’t have a responsibility to pay out, though they might because otherwise they look terrible.
So, absent a truly amazing umbrella policy, I’d bet the driver is going to be looking at serious financial hardship, even with coverage and PIP covering some amount of the injuries and funeral expenses ($2k only for KS minimums!).
As I say in almost all insurance posts, check your coverage - the minimums get you a piece of paper to drive legally in most states, but don’t come close to covering modern property damage or injury claims.
Hey, Beck - have you seen the FB posts about the diabetic alert dog for the little kid? Dog’s name is Double, kid is Miles. The dog alerts whenever the blood sugar drops below 75 or above 140, beating the CGM. Even if the kid is outside and the dog is inside, he’ll catch the blood sugar swings. It’s very cool.
One afternoon in the fall of 2023 I (a diabetic) started feeling REALLY LOUSY while driving along a highway about 100 miles from my home. I was able to get off the highway but wound up on a twisty two-lane road with nowhere to pull over, blacked out due to very low blood sugar, and was fortunate in that I wound up driving slowly into a stop sign, preventing any further forward motion into the nearby intersection. Fortunate indeed. I was fine, in the end, and the car not seriously injured.
Anyway, what this has to do with the topic is that every six months for a while I had to get permission from my doctor to continue to drive. The DMV sent me forms for him to fill out, though after about four of those they told me I no longer needed to file the forms. I liked reading what the doctor said on each of these forms: “Patient agrees not to drive < 80.” I figured it would get me out of any speeding ticket a cop might want to issue to me: “See, officer, I’m under doctor’s orders to drive 80+ miles an hour!”