The reasons for traffic accidents are not always readily apparent. This is not to say that car, truck or motorcycle collisions happen for no reason at all, but simply because the factors that influence certain automobile wrecks are too numerous or intertwined to be immediately obvious, even to professionals like those who work on police accident reconstruction teams.
As Maryland personal injury attorneys and auto accident lawyers, my firm is dedicated to representing our clients and to helping the victims of car and commercial trucking accidents recover damages owed to them as a result of another person’s negligence. Working together with police and other forensic analysts, personal injury lawyers gather the pertinent facts and evidence from an accident scene to better prove a client’s case against another negligent party.
This evidence can range from something as simple as the length of skid marks on a roadway, to the chemical analysis of a drunken driver’s blood-alcohol content following a fatal traffic wreck. Whatever the specific circumstances of an automobile or trucking-related injury accident, the facts are what support our client’s assertions that another driver or other person was responsible for the accident that may have injured or incapacitated them.
A couple news items we ran across recently point out how even in the most obvious situations the facts are not as apparent as most people on the outside may assume. In one of these articles, a man died when his vehicle was struck from behind along a stretch of the Baltimore Beltway early on a Saturday morning. In the second article, five teenagers were hurt when the vehicle they were riding in apparently left the road and smashed into a nearby tree.
According to Maryland State Police, 33-year-old David Wilt was killed after the Saturn sedan he sitting in was reportedly hit at high speed by a Ford pickup truck. Based on news articles, the crash took place along the Anne Arundel section of I-695, not far from Md. Rte 2 in Glen Burnie. Police stated that the victim’s vehicle was apparently stationary — either stopped or parked — in the fast lane of the Beltway at the time of the collision.
While there was no immediate reason given for the victim to have been stopped in the roadway, police did say that the driver of the F-250 pickup apparently tried to avoid the Saturn using “evasive maneuvers” but could not clear the vehicle and ended up colliding with the victim’s car. The sheer force of the collision sent the Saturn off to side of the roadway.
Police said the pickup driver was transported to Baltimore Washington Medical Center, apparently for treatment of injuries and to take a blood test, the results of which were not available at the time of the news article.
In another crash, which happened several hours earlier in the day, a car carrying a handful of teenagers reportedly went out of control, left the roadway and struck a nearby tree. According to police reports, the accident happened just after midnight in Pasadena, MD, along a stretch of Ridge Rd near Stoney Creek Dr. The news article indicated that the teens were traveling in a Nissan sedan when the crash occurred. Police did not know, at the time of the news article, why the 18-year-old driver lost control or if the crash may have been precipitated by a steering failure or other mechanical problem with the vehicle itself.
The driver and his four passengers were all taken to Maryland Shock Trauma in Baltimore for treatment of their injuries.
Driver of car stopped in travel lane killed in I-695 accident, BaltimoreSun.com, May 5, 2012
Car Crashes into Tree, 5 Teens in ‘Serious Condition’, Patch.com, May 5, 2012