Distracted Driver Hits Child in Crosswalk


We represented the mother of a young man whom was hit by an SUV in a crosswalk while the driver was texting on her phone. The young man suffered a broken hip but made a great recovery. We filed a lawsuit and proved that the other driver was distracted. Pedestrian accidents are one thing we do a lot of at Hill Law Firm.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Justin Hill: When an Air Force captain in San Antonio needed an attorney for the injuries her son suffered, she called the Hill Law Firm. In 2017, a young man was walking across the street in front of his elementary school. At the time, the school was having one of those Scholastic Book Fairs. The kids were encouraged to stay after school and shop. His mother had let him stick around. He was in fifth or sixth grade at the time.

When he was leaving school, he was walking across the crosswalk with the lights flashing. At or about the same time, a woman was driving her SUV and wasn’t paying attention, she was looking at her phone. She hit this young man and threw him, what witnesses say, 20 feet in the air. He came down in the roadway. He was taken to the emergency room and he was very badly injured. A multitude of test were performed and imaging was done and it turned out that he had broken his hip, that she had hit him hard enough with her vehicle to break his hip.

We filed this case against that distracted driver. Her insurance company showed up and said that it wasn’t that bad because his hip wasn’t displaced. They tried to argue the fact that his hip was still in correct alignment, albeit broken. Made it not that serious of an injury. This was one sure way to anger our client, the mother. We pursued this case while her son continued to get monitored by doctors. We weren’t sure how his recovery would progress. It turns out he made a full recovery. His hip was able to heal. He was able to get back to what he did before. He didn’t complain of any pain or mobility issues.

We weren’t going to buy the insurance company’s argument that the fact that his hip break wasn’t displaced meant it wasn’t that serious. What was serious was they had insured and were defending a woman who was playing on her phone when she hit a young little boy. A little boy who was doing the right thing using the crosswalk with the lights flashing. It was a wonder she didn’t kill him and this wasn’t a different case. In the end, as we got closer to trial, the insurance company dropped this frivolous defense and they paid the full policy limits.

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