Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
(Please note: the names and locations of all parties have been changed to protect the confidentiality of the participants in this bus accident/personal injury case and its proceedings.)
4. In the present case, Officer Smith had no physical evidence to support his jaywalking opinion.
There was no physical evidence that demonstrated Ms. Chance was anywhere but inside the crosswalk from the time she left the curb until being knocked out of hem shoes by Davie’s bus except White’s hearsay statement. Officer Adams also had noted nothing that could be construed as evidence of where Ms. Chance was at the time she was hit. Since she was found shoeless and sitting in front of the stopped bus, she must have been thrown from someplace earlier in the bus’s path which logically would be somewhere underneath the 40-foot-long stopped bus, whose southernmost point was only18 feet below the Elm Street curb line according to Smith’s measurement. That position would have the bus straddle the subject crosswalk whose borders were defined by the red painted curb only 8 to 10 feet distant (18 feet minus the width of the sidewalk) from the southern most point of the stopped bus.
5. Officer Smith had no reliable hearsay to help form his opinion.
In addition to having no relevant physical measurements to identify the point of impact, Officer Smith had only the hearsay description of Chance’s conduct according to Ms. White that, considering her claimed vantage point of view for this description was impossible for her to have seen.
The harried Smith unquestioningly wrote down what White tells him including where she says she saw the accident unfold. According to the report, her vantage point was inside an automobile stopped on the northeast side of 4th Street. This is the sane east side of 4th Ave as both the bus and pedestrian Chance entered. Since the bus is 12 feet tall and 40 feet long, it would be impossible for her to see anything along the east side of 4th Street behind the bus from whence Ms. Chance must have exited the curb if she was to be struck by the bus once the bus had begun to enter the intersection. Never the less, she tells of seeing Chance bolt out after the bus moves into the intersection apparently employing some kind of x-ray vision. White’s statement lacks any other characteristics that would render it reliable. For example, there is nothing in her statement that is against her interest or a dying declaration. It was not an excited utterance being delivered by a volunteer witness near the end of Smith’s brief investigation. Petra White, a Spanish speaker, also failed to demonstrate impartiality by her conduct at the scene as demonstrated in her deposition where she expressed greater concern over the Spanish-speaking, handsome young man’s distress than the prostate and bleeding, elderly Filipino woman. (See Part 11 of 13.)
For more information, you are welcome to contact Sacramento personal injury lawyer, Moseley Collins.