Date: July 4, 2010

City:  LaGrange Township

County: Lorain

Type: Car Accident
 
The Fourth of July weekend is a very dangerous time in Ohio and throughout the country.  The following accident shows just how dangerous.  A 37-year-old Lagrange Township man was traveling westbound on Webster Rd. when he was struck by a pickup truck heading Southbound, according to authorities.  The driver of the car was ejected from his vehicle and flown to Akron General Hospital critically injured. His condition was unknown as of Monday.  Our prayers and best wishes go out to the family and the injured man in this story.

Many times car on truck collisions leave the occupants of the car more seriously injured than the truck driver, on average. This is simple physics. The truck weighs more, and has more force behind it when it hits the smaller, lighter car.  Truck accidents, in my experience, result in more serious injuries than car on car accidents, all other things equal. 

As a general rule, these sort of stop sign accidents cause problems for investigators because without a witness, it is usually the word of the parties and a smart police man or woman that decides what actually occurred. As a general rule, in Ohio, a person has a duty to stop at a stop sign, and to proceed in a safe manner through the intersection.   When there are no witnesses, it usually becomes the case that the person without the stop sign is found innocent and the party at the stop sign is found to be at fault, either for not stopping at the stop sign or for proceeding in an unsafe manner through the intersection.  Of course, the party with no stop sign must avoid the accident if possible, and can also be found negligent, known as “comparative negligence” for not taking the last clear chance to avoid the accident. This is known as the last clear chance doctrine in Ohio.  Of course, whether or not both parties were speeding is also a factor. Modern science and smart cars are making it easier to figure out what actually happened in these sort of collisions.  More and more cars have computers that will tell you how fast the person was traveling the last five seconds before the accident. These black boxes are becoming more and more common and important in intersection, red light and lane change accidents, where it is usually one party’s word against another.  These sort of “he said she said” accidents have always been a problem for Ohio personal injury lawyers, and would many times turn on the credibility of the people involved, and not actually what happened.
 
If we step back in general and look at the big picture in Ohio regarding car crashes, according to the Ohio Department of Public Safety, in 2008 there was one fatal crash in LaGrange Township killing one person and 15 fatal crashes in Lorain County, killing 16.  LaGrange Township had 26 injury crashes that injured 48 people and Lorain County had 591 crashes in which 892 people were hurt.  Throughout Ohio, there were 320,876 crashes in 2008, with more than 77,000 of these crashes causing injury and more than 1,000 of these crashes causing the loss of human life.


If you have been seriously injured in a LaGrange Township car crash, call the Lorain County car accident lawyers at Chester Law Group at 1-800-218-4243 or order your FREE BOOK entitled “The Insider’s Guide to Handling Ohio Accident Claims” at www.chesterlaw.com.