The family of an Illinois man recently settled a wrongful death case for $5 million. The man was killed in a Reading Township truck accident in 2009. The man allegedly was driving on Illinois Route 17 and was hit by a semi-tractor trailer which ran a four-way stop sign on the road and impacted the man’s car on his driver’s side.
The man was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash. He was survived by his wife and three adult children. The man’s wife brought a wrongful death action against the trucker and his employers in LeSalle County Circuit Court. The trucker’s employer settled the case and provided the wife with $1.9 million and $1.9 million for his surviving heirs in addition to attorney fees and expenses.
Unfortunately wrongful death actions are not uncommon in the context of truck accidents. The significantly greater size of trucks means that car passengers frequently suffer catastrophic or fatal injuries in truck accidents.
Several serious truck accidents have made news recently. One Illinois man was killed last week in Wayne County after a trucker rammed his pickup truck on I-64. The Belleville, Illinois, man was thrown from his pickup truck, which was hit on the driver’s side.
An Oak Park, Illinois man was killed when his truck was rear-ended by a trucker last month on I-80 near Potter, Nebraska. That crash backed up traffic and contributed to another crash in which a trucker from River Grove, Illinois, rammed into two cars driven by a Maryland couple. That crash killed the married couple and their two toddlers. An autopsy revealed that the wife was also 30 weeks pregnant, which is why prosecutors decided to charge the Illinois man with five counts of vehicular homicide. Fatigued driving is suspected in that crash.
Source: Berry v. OSF Healthcare Sys., 2011 WL 2023518 (Ill.Cir.)
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