Regardless of whether a person is eight years old, 28 years old or eighty-eighty years old, nobody deserves to die in an automobile or commercial truck accident; and certainly not in one that could have been prevented. Here in the Baltimore area, as well as in places like Columbia, Rockville, Washington, D.C., or Annapolis, the frequency of fatal car crashes can give one pause.
As of 2009, Maryland had a highway fatality rate just a tick lower than the national average. While this may sound like a positive thing — and we have seen our traffic death rate drop progressively over the years — it still doesn’t change the fact that in 2010, about 10 people died in this state every week as a result of a traffic-related collision. That is nothing to crow about.
For personal injury lawyers like ourselves, we see the aftermath in human terms on a fairly regular basis; those victims of car, truck and motorcycle wrecks who only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We see those individuals who have suffered severe and sometimes life-altering injuries such as closed-head trauma, first-degree burns, fractured arms and legs, as well as internal injuries and spinal cord damage. To these people, the fact that total vehicle accidents decreased by 10 percent between 2009 and 2010 doesn’t make their injuries any less painful or their prognosis for a normal life any more hopeful.
That fact is, and will continue to be, that roadway accidents are unfortunately a fact of life in our modern age. A great deal must happen before we can hope to eliminate the majority of traffic-related injuries and deaths. And we will likely continue to read sad news reports like the one a short time ago that described the death of an elderly woman in what was likely a deliberate traffic collision.
According to news articles, a 74-year-old Baltimore County woman was driving along a stretch of Reisterstown Rd. on a Tuesday evening late last month when for some reason a Carroll County man in a sport utility vehicle swerved his vehicle across the centerline and hit the victim’s car head-on. Police reports indicated that the driver of the SUV may have been suicidal at the time of the collision.
The accident, if one could call it that, took place sometime after 8pm following a call to police advising them that a man who was threatening suicide was heading into the Baltimore County area in a motor vehicle. Officers apparently located the suspect’s vehicle in a Reisterstown parking lot, but as they approached the SUV drove away, striking the police car in the process.
Following the encounter with Baltimore County police officers, the suspect’s SUV reportedly crossed the center line on Reisterstown Rd., hitting the victim’s vehicle and a minivan, and then a nearby utility pole. The elderly local woman was pronounced dead at the scene of the collision, while the 20-year-old suspect, as resident of Westminster, MD, suffered life-threatening injuries. Police said the man was taken to a local hospital for treatment.
74-Year-Old Woman Dies In 2-Car Crash, CBSLocal.com, February 27, 2013