A woman died on Jan. 6 in a crash with a tractor trailer in Cambridge, Vermont.

According to Vermont State Police, the 61 year old woman was a passenger in a 2005 Toyota Highlander driven by a 43 year old woman who suffered a broken leg in the accident.

Police added that a tractor trailer going south on Route 104 did not yield to the Highlander which was going west on Route 15. The vehicles slammed into each other at the busy intersection. The truck hit the passenger side of the Highlander and led to the woman’s fatal injuries.

The accident is still being investigated but police noted at the time of the crash that the tractor trailer did not yield as required to the SUV.

Our View

Our tractor trailer accident attorneys in Virginia know that failure to yield mistakes on the road can lead to deadly accidents. These accidents are even more devastating when the accident involves a huge tractor trailer.

Failure to yield happens for many reasons, and they occur often at intersections. They also can happen when the truck driver pulls out of a parking lot onto a busy road or when changing lanes. In any of these cases, the truck driver is required by law to judge the time and space needed to stop safely. Sometimes the truck driver may be distracted behind the wheel and fail to stop when supposed to.

One of the most unfortunate failure to yield truck crashes our Virginia attorneys have worked on was in Virginia Beach, where a truck driver failed to stop at a stop light behind a small car. The parents were in the front seats and their children were in the back seats. The truck driver was going to several eating establishments at the time of the accident. Apparently, the truck driver fell asleep behind the wheel and slammed into our clients’ vehicle at 40 MPH.

The next thing the truck driver remembers was he got out of the cab and found he had essentially run over the car. Other drivers testified that the truck approached the car from the rear, never slowed, and slammed into the vehicle.

The trucker claimed that he had fainted, but the police who investigated the crash suspected he had simply fallen asleep. No doctor found anything wrong with the truck driver.

The terrible truck crash caused the front seats to collapse into the rear passenger area, causing serious head trauma to the two children. One of the children had a mild concussion and recovered, but the other child suffered serious head injuries. At the end of the case, we settled for $5.5 million and a structured annuity that will pay the clients $21 million.

The lesson is that truck drivers must pay attention to their driving and make sure they are well rested. Failing to yield to smaller vehicles on the road usually has devastating consequences.