Los Angeles Injury Lawyer Blog

In a wrongful death motorcycle accident negligence case last year, we obtained a $2 million verdict for our client whose 29 year old son was killed while operating a motorcycle because a 17 year old SUV driver made a bad left turn in front of him at an intersection, in Pasadena, Los Angeles County, California.

On the night of the accident, our client's son, a motorcycle operator, was traveling through a traffic controlled intersection, when an SUV driver coming from the opposite direction negligently made a bad left turn on a yellow light, causing the accident and our client's son's death.

The SUV driver was insured by Allstate Insurance Company, and had a $100,000 insurance policy. However, Allstate refused to pay the $100,000 to settle the case because it felt the police report was in the SUV driver's favor.

The police report, based on a few statements of claimed eye witnesses, said that our client’s son caused the accident by entering the intersection on a red light, and that the defendant SUV driver legally made his turn from the middle of the intersection, having waited for the light to turn red.

We hired an expert who analyzed the scene of the accident, the photographs taken by the police, and the vehicles involved in the accident. He testified at trial that the physical evidence such as the skid marks, the debris left by the vehicles in the roadway at the time of the accident, the damage pattern on the vehicles themselves, and the position of rest of the motorcycle, proved that the Defendant SUV driver was speeding, started his turn before he reached the intersection by cutting across the double yellow lines, and made his turn when he should have seen that the motorcycle was too close. Our expert also testified that the light was yellow both at the time that the motorcycle entered the intersection and at the time of the accident.

We worked with an animator to re-create the accident so that we could show the jury how the accident occurred. Click the image to see the animations.

The defense hired multiple experts which testified that the SUV driver began his left turn in the middle of the intersection, as the light turned from yellow to red, and that he did not see the motorcycle approaching before the accident. The defense experts testified that the motorcycle entered the intersection on a red light, speeding 5-10 mph over the posted speed limit and accelerating into the intersection. Lastly, the defense experts testified that the SUV driver couldn’t see the motorcycle because it was night time, and the motorcycle’s lights were masked by the lights of the cars traveling behind it.

Defendants called the witnesses listed in the police report to testify at trial. But we were able to show that the witnesses either did not have a good vantage point to see the whole accident, or that what they saw actually supported our theory of the case.

The jury found the 17 year old driver of the SUV to be negligent and the sole cause of the motorcycle driver’s death. The jury awarded $2 million to his mother in wrongful death damages (i.e. compensation for the loss of her son’s love, companionship, comfort, care, assistance, protection, affection, society, and moral support).

The defense appealed the verdict all the way up to the California Supreme Court, but we successfully fought the appeals, and the decision was allowed to stand. Also, our client was awarded interest for the amount of time delayed by the appeals.

Because Allstate had unreasonably refused to settle this very serious wrongful death case for the $100,000 policy limits before trial, and because it faced a potential insurance bad faith lawsuit from the SUV driver for failing to protect him by paying his policy limits and thereby exposing him to the $2 million verdict, Allstate was forced to pay the full judgment.