Heart-breaking human tragedies happen all too often here in Maryland, not to mention throughout the nation and the world, so there is little sense railing against the nature of fate and unexpected events. Yet, this is just the problem with traffic-related injuries and deaths; so much about car, truck and motorcycle accidents would seem to be preventable, if not mostly avoidable. When a car or trucking accident takes the life of someone, anyone, we all suffer to some extent.
Families suffer through the loss of a loved one; a spouse, a sibling, a parent or a child killed in a tragic traffic accident. Society suffers in some way as well, with the loss of a fellow human being and, in the case of children or young adults, a young life that may have been full of promise, now gone forever. Never mind the financial costs to the family or the community, especially if the victim was a major contributor to the well-being of the local economy or a supporter of charities and other benevolent organizations.
In short, fatal highway wrecks in no way improve the human condition; at best they can only point up deficiencies in the safety of certain vehicles, poor design in particular roads, or lack of care on the part of another, possibly negligent driver. As Maryland injury attorneys practicing in the Baltimore area, as well as Washington, D.C., we understand how a family can be ripped asunder by a senseless and preventable death caused by a highway collision.
Whether someone is critically injured or killed while driving a passenger car to the shopping mall, operating a commercial delivery truck in the city, or riding a motorcycle out in the country, the results of a misstep on another person’s part can alter the course of an innocent person’s life, sometimes permanently. This scenario plays itself out day after day, week after week across the nation. In fact, one such accident took the lives of a family from Maryland not long ago, according to news reports.
Based on news stories, a family of four was traveling in two separate vehicles and on their way to a new life on the West Coast when tragedy struck at the halfway point in the journey. Reports indicate that a husband and wife, as well as their two toddlers all died in a deadly wreck caused when a commercial truck slammed into a car driven by the 30-year-old father, pushing his vehicle into his pregnant wife’s car and triggering a fire in the process. All four individuals and their unborn child perished at the scene of the awful collision on Interstate 80 in Nebraska.
Having been tied up in an earlier fatal accident along the interstate, the family eventually was able to get going again along the westbound expressway. But not long after, during another traffic backup, the driver of a tractor-trailer rig failed to slow down as he reportedly approached the vehicles carrying the young family. Police stated that the truck slammed into the husband’s ’10 Mustang, which then pushed his wife’s Toyota Corolla under the back-end of a truck ahead of her. In addition to killing every person in both of those cars, the crash killed the family’s three pets as well.
At the time of the news article, Police were still investigating the root cause of the crash, but authorities did say that the 36-year-old trucker was charged with four separate counts of manslaughter, plus vehicular homicide. At the time of the news report, the man was in custody in lieu of one million dollars bail.
Family of four died in huge pileup, StarHerald.com, September 16, 2012