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Video Helps Lawyers Win Fatal Crash Settlement
Connecticut Law Tribune
Monday, July 26, 2010
Copyright 2010, ALM Properties, Inc.
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Video Helps Lawyers Win Fatal Crash Settlement
Six cameras on Conn. Transit bus show impact in different light
By THOMAS B. SCHEFFEY
When Michael Jainchill and other lawyers at Hartford’s RisCassi & Davis first reviewed the bus accident death of biotech executive Michael Jaye, they had serious doubts that the case could possibly be won.
The 2009 accident in downtown New Haven initially looked like it was almost entirely the fault of Jaye, a pedestrian, who was chatting with his wife on his cell phone and crossing against the light the morning of May 4, at about 8:45. Dressed casually, wearing a green baseball cap and drinking a Coke Zero, he had evidently entered a pedestrian crosswalk well before the light turned green.
Connecticut Transit bus driver Woodrow Minick, a 14-year veteran, was making a wide left turn from College Street to South Frontage. College is one way, and the bus was making its turn, legally, from the second lane from the left.
Jaye had crossed more than halfway when the bus hit him. “The police concluded that the accident was his fault. He walked against the ‘don’t walk’ sign. The bus driver had a green light,” Jainchill recounted.
But in barely a year, Jainchill turned a hard-to-win case into a $3.9 million settlement, thanks to an innovative use of technology that involved piecing together video from internal cameras on the bus.
Connecticut Transit is owned by the state Department of Transportation, which contracts with private companies to provide bus service in metropolitan areas throughout the state. David Lee, the company’s general manager in Hartford, said the company is self-insured and normally handles its own bus accident claims in-house.
But he said, because of the “serious nature” of the accident that killed Jave, the case was assigned by the State Insurance and Risk Management Board to Specialty Risk Services, a private company that’s a subsidiary of The Hartford. The representative who handled the case, according to Lee, could not be reached for comment.
Asking Why
Under Connecticut’s comparative negligence law, unless a plaintiff can prove that others were more than 50 percent at fault, the case would be a total loss for the plaintiff.
But attorney Jainchill kept probing. He wasn’t convinced he understood everything that had happened here.
“Maybe it’s a 50-50 case,” Jainchill began to think. “[Jave] was on the phone, but there’s no law against being on the phone when you’re walking; it’s only when you’re driving [that cell phone use is banned]. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention, but he made it halfway across. Why didn’t the bus driver see him?”
Because New Haven and state police had already investigated, and concluded the pedestrian was at fault, “they weren’t particularly helpful,” Jainchill said. But some of the police evidence turned out to be valuable. “They had a list of all the passengers on the bus” who could then be interviewed, Jainchill said. More significantly, the police had video from the bus’s internal camera system.
“This was something I was unaware of,” said Jainchill, one of the state’s most experienced trial lawyers. Apparently, there are six or seven cameras on Connecticut Transit buses. “This is where the case turned around,” the attorney explained.
“We got a CD copy of it, and I put it on the machine [but] I couldn’t understand it, because the cameras run in one-second intervals, and it just keeps jumping around,” from each of the six viewpoints, Jainchill.
One camera points straight ahead, two catch the view as seen from the left and right rear view mirrors, another is focused on the driver, and a fifth scans the passengers from the front of the bus. To have the hodgepodge of camera shots make sense, Jainchill enlisted a video expert -- Kathy Reese at Geomatrix in Woodbridge, who had done a lot of video work for RisCassi & Davis in the past. Reese’s presentation gave Jainchill longer looks from each camera.
“Lo and behold, what it showed was, when the light turned green for the bus driver to make the left hand turn from the second lane, onto South Frontage, he was really concerned about something else,” Jainchill said.
Driver Minick was evidently concerned about a vehicle that might dart up the inside left lane as the bus made a wide left turn from the second lane.
The driver “is turning the [steering] wheel of the bus, and he turned his head all the way to his left, looking behind him. You can see the bill of his cap turning around. He’s not even looking forward,” Jainchill said “You see the pedestrian get hit and killed in the front windshield of the bus.”
‘The Impact Happens’
The video is indeed dramatic. The view to the rear from the driver’s side is in some ways the most compelling.
As he walked briskly along the College Street sidewalk, to the left and rear of the bus, Michael Jaye seemed absorbed in his phone call, with no idea he was just seconds away from the fatal impact. The 13-ton bus was moving so slowly Jaye overtook it. A silvery bike rack on the front of the bus also struck him, but his head visibly struck the windshield, shattering it in a star formation. His hat flew off, and he fell to the ground, unconscious, with a serious head injury. He died three days later.
Additional evidence that the driver was not looking forward at the time of impact came from the camera trained on the passengers. A young man who was standing and holding onto an upright pole provided additional evidence that Jaye was visible in the crosswalk, and would have been seen if the driver were looking forward.
“He’s looking forward, as the driver is looking to his left, and you can almost see his eyes bug open, because he saw the pedestrian, and he knows the driver hasn’t seen him,” Jainchill said. “And then boom, the impact happens.”
Several claims agents for the state met with Jainchill initially. At first they were confident that the plaintiff’s comparative negligence, along with the police investigation, made the case nearly impossible for Jainchill to take to a jury.
“I said, ‘You know what? I think I have something you ought to see,’” Jainchill mentioned in a telephone call to the state’s claims agents. “A couple of them came over, and I explained my theory to them. I threw this videotape into the player, and the next thing you know, they’re talking to me about getting the case settled.”
Jaye was 56 and had strong prospects for future earning potential. His wife, a lawyer for a Philadelphia title company, sued for loss of consortium. The couple has two college age sons. The settlement, said Jainchill, allocates $3 million to Jaye’s estate and $950,000 in loss of consortium damages to his widow.
The state is self-insured up to $4 million, with amounts over that covered by an excess liability insurance policy. For Jainchill, the case was an eye-opener. “Maybe other people know this, but I didn’t have any idea there were video cameras on the Connecticut Transit buses,” he said.•