A truck owned by the city of Jackson, Mississippi struck and killed a pedestrian, and subsequently crashed into the city’s Gateway Rescue Mission center for  the homeless. 

The truck crash was reported at 10:15 AM in Jackson, Mississippi on May 8. The police reported that the truck was going south on Gallatin St. in Jackson when it swerved into the northbound lane. It then left the road and hit a 58 year old pedestrian. The impact of the crash pushed the pedestrian through a fence and under an awning. The man was killed upon impact.

The truck driver was a 51 year old city employee who may have suffered a medical emergency behind the wheel.

Our View

National statistics tell us that 5376 pedestrians and 818 bicyclists were killed in car and truck accidents in 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These two categories of motor vehicle fatalities were nearly 18% of the total fatalities of 30,092 that year. There also were 70,000 pedestrians who were injured in motor vehicle crashes that year. And these injury statistics are only part of the picture becuase only a fraction of pedestrian accident injuries are reported to the police.

Many of these accidents are due to driver negligence and inattention. Car accidents involving serious injury and death often occur because truck and car drivers are distracted behind the wheel. Common distractions that take attention from the road include eating and drinking; cell phone and texting; playing with the radio; and falling asleep.

Another common problem that leads to serious car and truck accidents is when the driver has a medical emergency. Many people think that if the driver has a medical emergency, he or she cannot be at fault in a serious accident that hurts or kills someone. This is not always the case.

Sometimes the driver was well aware of a serious medical condition that they needed to treat but did not, and that negligence leads to an accident. In that case, the driver can be held liable in a personal injury lawsuit or a wrongful death lawsuit.

Our personal injury attorneys who specialize in truck accidents in Virginia have seen exactly this type of truck accident case in the past. We had a trucker client who was tragically sideswiped and killed on I-95 in Virginia recently. Another truck driver struck him; it turned out that the negligent truck driver had a medical emergency that led him to pass out and hit and kill our client.

The truck driver had a medical condition that actually killed him a few days after the truck crash. We sued the trucking company in a wrongful death action. The trucking company tried to argue that the medical emergency was unforseen, but we showed that the trucker and company knew about it in advance and should have acted to prevent the accident from happening. We obtained a $2.25 million settlement in that truck crash case.