It seems to have become much more dangerous lately to take a Sunday drive in upstate New York. A few weeks ago a horrifying accident took place on the Taconic State Parkway took the lives of three children and two adults when a drunken driver and mother of 3 took a wrong turn and ended up going north in the southbound lane of the highway. Then yesterday authorities say one person died and two others were hospitalized after a car collided with another vehicle while fleeing police in an Albany-area town. Troopers say police were chasing two vehicles when one of the drivers lost control of his car and it crossed the centerline, colliding with another vehicle head-on. The driver of the first car was pronounced dead at the scene. Two people in the other vehicle were taken to Albany Medical Center. Their conditions were unknown. Looks like the personal injury lawyers in the area will have their hands full. .
The Daily News reported today the New York City College of Technology recently unveiled its new construction safety facility to give builders training on how to beef up job site safety. It seems that the school is doing the right thing. I’m sure that members of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association would applaud the effort. Lawyers like Richard Gurfein, of the law firm Gurfein Douglas, has been championing the cause of worker safety for many years now. According to the article, the hands-on training will be conducted on full-sized scaffolding equipment. Gurfein, a trained engineer and former high school teacher said the classes are a multimedia hybrid of lectures and labs, allowing for an expansion in the course curriculum. The new facility is equipped with supported and suspended scaffold setups, a Level B Hazmat suit, air quality tester and other safety devices. “This facility is important for several reasons,” Gurfein said, “with the first being that safety training can save lives.”.
There are some crimes that are so repugnant I wish the courts had the power to ignore certain statutes on the books and punish the perpetrators, or their enablers in this case, to the full extent of the law. The New York Daily News reported today that seven Poly Prep Country School students sued the school Monday on charges of covering up their complaints of sexual abuse against a longtime football coach. The suit, filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, accuses Poly Prep’s current and former headmaster and trustees of the elite private school of conspiring to intimidate or muzzle victims who said they were molested by ex-coach Philip Foglietta. A similar suit filed by another alumnus was thrown out of state court in 2006 because the statute of limitations had passed. Foglietta died of cancer in 1998. “Their suffering has been increased exponentially by reason of Poly Prep’s historic, continued and prolonged suppression and concealment of the sexual abuse which was engineered by Foglietta, but condoned and facilitated by Poly Prep,” the complaint charges. The suit claims Foglietta sexually abused dozens, “if not hundreds” of boys between 1966 and 1991. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages. In this instance, I strongly feel that the limitations statute (I call it a loophole) should not apply, and that the school — like the Catholic Church — must be held accountable for their complicity in this crime. I welcome comments from other bloggers, especially any lawyers who might be able to explain under what circumstances, if any, statutes like these could be waved, or not apply. Surely this would have to be one of those instances.
I posted a blog here last week about the father of a 16-year-old North Carolina boy who was stabbed on a city bus in the Bronx. According to The New York Daily News today the father is now suing NYC Transit because he says the bus driver did not call for help and abandoned his bleeding son on the street.
I argued in support of the father, who is well within his legal rights to try and exact punishment from the MTA for the gross failure, and negligence, of one of its drivers.
But, as we all know, there are always two sides to every story. One Daily News online reader, and an MTA employee, had this to say today about the incident.
“First of all none of us really knows what happened on that bus on that day, because none of was there. The Daily news loves to sensationalize anything topic that happens with the MTA and you people just eat it up. I’am an MTA employee and we have certain guidelines to notify police when situations arise. I’am very positive the Bus driver called for police like he is suppose to. Maybe it was not at the exact moment of the incident, because more than likely the bus driver does not have a direct line to the police himself, and someone called 911 from their cellphone. This is a very tragic situation, but why put all the blame on the bus driver?? Did he stab the kid?? No!!. We should put the blame on the parents who raise their kids like this with no respect or home training. So I blame the parents and the schools for not doing their jobs to educate these children correctly. And if you’ve ever been on a city bus in the bronx after high school lets out you know it’s a complete nightmare. Y
I would like to hear the opinions of any of you blog readers out there.
Do I smell foul play here? The daughter of a pioneering female hardhat who died in a Queens fire said on Thursday she will continue her mom’s fight for justice to honor her legacy. Her mother, Bianca Wisniewski, a safety inspection supervisor, was the victim of sexual harassment in the workplace about 8 months ago. Despite her repeated pleas for help, a male elevator operator, who worked at the same construction site, continued to verbally abuse and grope her, while her employer stood by and did nothing. Wisniewski, 44, died Sunday, a day before she was to testify in a $20 million lawsuit charging she was sexually harassed at a JPMorgan Chase construction site on Park Ave. Her daughter, husband and two friends were also injured in the blaze.
The father of a 16-year-old North Carolina boy is suing NYC Transit because he says a bus driver did not call for help after the driver saw his son being stabbed by a pack of young thugs on his bus. According to the father, the driver saw a group of boys begin fighting with the boy and then stabbing him several times.
If the boy’s father is right, this driver should lose his job. And, the city should be severely penalized for entrusting this driver with the responsibility of providing safe transport for New Yorkers, which should be the top priority of anyone behind the wheel of a city bus.
“It happened right in front of him,” the father said.
“Instead of radioing for help, the bus driver pulls over to a non-bus stop and tells the kids to get off,” said the father’s attorney, who filed a lawsuit in Bronx Supreme Court this week seeking unspecified damages. “The attackers pushed my client off the bus, so in addition to all of these stab wounds, he fractured one of his ankles. The bus driver shut his doors and kept going.”
I ride city buses all the time. I depend on the driver to get me from point A to point B safely. And, if problems arise in transit, I expect, and would depend on the driver, to do something about it, at the very least call for help. I hope this situation will force NYC Transit officials to screen their drivers more carefully, or provide more training to handle emergency situations like this.
Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her Halliburton/KBR co-workers while working in Iraq and locked in a shipping container for over a day to prevent her from reporting her attack. But to add serious insult to serious injury she was not allowed to sue KBR because her employment contract said that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration–a process that overwhelmingly favors corporations.
This year, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment that would deny defense contracts to companies that ask employees to sign away the right to sue. It passed, but the amendment received 30 nay votes all from Republicans.
These are the same Fxqzing Asxzholes that are urging congress to enact laws that would weaken the rights of patients who are injured, or killed, by negligent doctors and hospital staff. I’ve got to believe that voters, even in the red states, are beginning to see through the self-serving, malicious intentions of the hard right in this country.
Lenny Rosado raised his 11-year-old daughter, Leandra, as a single father on a security man’s paycheck since she was 4. Leandra was killed Sunday in a horrific drunken-driving crash.
The driver, a mother of two, laughed when Leandra, and other kids in the car begged her to slow down. Now Leandra is dead, and the others badly injured, because of a drunken woman who committed one of the most obscene acts of personal irresponsibilty I can ever remember. It boggles the mind how a grown-up can be so stupid and sellfish.
She deserves to be treated now for what she is: a murderer. They should lock her up and throw away the key. And, then some good personal injury lawyer should go after everything she owns and give it all to Lenny Rosado. Not that that will ever help him get over his grief, the degree to which I can’t begin to imagine.
Overall, I think Michael Bloomberg has been a very good mayor for New York City and I, for one, wouldn’t mind one bit, in fact I would like to see him keep the job for another 4 years. But, he is a politician and at times even good ones can demonstrate just how clueless they can be.
As is the case recently involving the deaths of three 9/11 responders. Just yesterday, 8 years since the WTC bombing, and many deaths of first responders later due to lung ailments like emphysema and cancer, and the Mayor is just now saying that the deaths of these last three, all in one week, “Are enough proof for me that people are getting sick from working at Ground Zero.”
Then he went on to say, which is entirely untrue if you speak to countless medical experts, that it’s possible: “But nobody’s sure” that breathing the toxic air down at the World Trade Center site causes illness and was to blame in the death of these three men. The Daily News reported that the two cops and a firefighter died of cancer. Of course it’s the cause.
NYPD Officer Robert Grossman died of cancer Friday at the age of 44. The next day, Firefighter Richard Mannetta, 44, died of cancer. And last Wednesday, 37-year-old Police Officer Cory Diaz also died of cancer. Firefighter John McNamara, 44, died of cancer last month. And, the mayor still isn’t convinced.
To his credit, however, Mayor Bloomberg is pushing the federal government to help pay their families back for their medical care. Bloomberg said time is running out. “I think that it’s just another reminder that we’ve just got to get Congress to pass the [bill] that would give us the money,” he said.
Who knows, maybe what appears to be tone deafness is just a clever tactic on the part of the mayor to get some much-needed help from a lax Federal Government.
This one really has to take the cake.
It reminds me of a recent episode of Boston Legal, where James Spader (Alan Shore) and William Shatner (Denny Crane) are handling a controversial murder case in city of New Orleans, several years after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. About half way through the show, in a prototypical scene featuring the two stars standing on a balcony outside the doors of their hotel room overlooking the French Quarter below, Spader says to Shatner: “I’m losing this case, Denny, and I don’t know why. What am I doing wrong? To wit, Shatner leans over toward his friend and colleague and says: “Alan, this is New Orleans. What’s up is down, what’s down is up. You’re trying the case like you’re back in Boston.”
I think it would be easy for most people who live here to make this same claim about the rough and tumble streets of New York City. A perfect example of this upside down 180 degree phenomenon, that would sound almost bizarre if it wasn’t happening here, was reported today in The New York Daily News.
It’s a story about members of a brazen Brooklyn crack gang that have raked in more than $500,000 in taxpayer money by repeatedly suing the city for civil rights violations. Accused drug dealers from the East 21st St. Crew sued the city more than 20 times – and the city settled every time, even though many of the same people sued again and again.
The reason: The city’s policy of aggressively settling cases rather than risk a big judgment after a costly trial. “The reputed drug dealers are raising hell in the community and collecting judgments on top of it,” one police source said. Authorities say the gang runs a street-level crack operation that wreakes havoc on an East Flatbush neighborhood. They were busted last month.
Incredibly, court records show the gang pulled in much better money from suing the city in Brooklyn Federal Court, claiming cops violated their civil rights.
One crew member got $117,500 from the city, in six separate claims, including one for $35,000 and three for $20,000 each. He’s charged with 37 sales, and was caught on video smiling as he counted out crack rocks, a law enforcement source said.