Sad as it is to report, car, truck and motorcycle accidents will likely remain a fact of life as we continue to soldier on into the New Year. As Maryland personal injury lawyers, I and my legal staff do not expect that 2012 will deliver and better news in terms of traffic deaths and serious car and trucking-related collisions. Of course, as the economy slowly makes its eventual recovery, the increase in commerce and relative prosperity will likely mean an increase in commuting and business miles.; with that inevitable rise in traffic activity comes the very real potential for increased injury accidents.
On that note, we noticed that one of the last days of 2011 saw multiple injuries and traffic fatalities on Maryland roadways. From these kinds of car and truck wrecks, one usually sees a variety of injuries; from the lesser types, like minor scrapes, cuts, bruises, to more serious bodily injury, such as broken bones, compound fractures, as well as serious neck, spinal cord damage and closed-head injuries.
Of the latter, traumatic brain injury and spinal cord damage can result in months or years of costly medical care, recuperation and rehabilitation. For families living on the ragged edge of financial existence, an event such as a bad car or commercial truck-related crash can spell disaster, especially if the victim is one of the key bread-winners for that family. Costly medical care combined with lost wages can quickly ruin a family’s meager savings and result in all manner of financially-related misery.
According to news articles, there were a number of fatalities reported toward the end of last year. As if fate were making up for lost opportunities, police and emergency rescue personnel were busy helping the victims of a number of serious injury and fatal car crashes. Among several Maryland traffic wrecks during the final days of 2011, the Silver Spring, MD, area saw a fatal single-vehicle crash happened during the early morning; while in the area of Towson, a major traffic collision took place during the mid-afternoon on a ramp that connects I-83 North and the Beltway. There were other traffic incidents as well.
Based on news reports, the Silver Spring wreck resulted in the death of two women when their vehicle crashed in the area of Piney Branch Rd. and University Blvd. Information on the crash was sketchy, however Montgomery County police reported that the accident happened in the early morning hours of December 28, killing two of the three occupants and injuring a third.
In Bethesda, one individual was killed and 11 other people were injured during a crash between a city bus and a pickup truck. According to news reports, the crash involved a Metrobus, however no addition information was available at the time of the news article.
Over in Baltimore County, near Towson, an I-83 ramp connecting the Inner Loop of the B-W Beltway was the site of a fatal accident that resulted in the death of a five-year-old child. According to Maryland State Police, a sport utility vehicle crashed into the rear-end of another passenger vehicle occupied by 47-year-old man, his wife and their two young children.
The force of the accident caused the family’s sedan to be pushed in the back of a third car. The driver, Frederick Owen and his wife, Susan, were sitting in the front seats, while their nine-year-old daughter and five-year-old son sat in the back. Following the accident, both children were medevaced to the Johns Hopkins Children’s Hospital, however the boy died about an hour after arriving at the hospital. At the time of the news report, the accident was still under investigation; however police did say that excessive speed was a likely factor in the accident.
In yet another accident earlier that day, a police patrol car was hit by a big-rig 18-wheeler causing the cruiser to be forced across the traffic lanes and into an adjacent jersey wall. The force of the crash was such that the officer inside the cruiser had to be freed by emergency responders arriving on the scene; he was then taken by Shock Trauma where he remained in what authorities described as stable condition. A Jeep carrying two other people was also caught up in the crash, however the occupants of that vehicle were not as badly injured and received non-life threatening injuries.
Fatal Accidents Mount On Maryland Highways, WBAL.com, December 29, 2011