The Daily New reported today that eight people have been hit by subway trains over the last 13 days in a baffling spike of suicides, attempted suicides and accidents. I wonder how authorities know the difference. There was as much carnage on the tracks between Feb. 13 and Wednesday as there typically is during an entire month, NYC Transit statistics reveal. That’s scary. But whose fault is it? In case where such an incident is clearly accidental, lawyers usually get involved when the deceased’s family file a civil suit against the city. Often justice is served. The City receives a resounding hit to its purse strings and the MTA is put on notice to beware of a next time. One transit union official, a veteran motorman, said train crews anecdotally noticed an increase in so-called “12-9s” – people struck by trains – starting late last year. Police and transit officials wouldn’t speculate on possible causes of the surge. Are the causes really that speculative? How difficult can it be to distinguish a suicide from negligent behavior? In each of the last three years, there were between 89 and 98 people hit on the tracks. Hasn’t the city had sufficient practice figuring out the causes?
More than 300 passengers aboard a U.S. cruise ship came down with a gastrointestinal illness during what should have been a relaxing vacation through the Caribbean, a cruise line said.
Celebrity Cruises ship Mercury departed Charleston, South Carolina, on February 15 and headed for the eastern Caribbean, according to a Celebrity Cruises statement.
On the way, 326 of the 1,838 passengers fell ill, along with 27 of the 849 crew members, the cruise line said.
The sickened passengers and crew have been given over-the-counter medicine and are responding well, Celebrity Cruises said.
Cruise ship passengers have a right to expect the carrier will ensure their health and safety while aboard their vessel. When illnesses like this do break out aboard ship, passengers are captive patients at the mercy of the ship’s doctors and staff for remedy.
Should a passenger on a cruise become seriously ill, or worse, I’m sure legitimate personal injury claims would follow. But most illnesses occur when the ship is on the high seas, and most cruise lines are the property of foreign-owned businesses. What should the injured passenger do in this situation?
Would appreciate input from any personal injury lawyer who reads this blog.
A Brooklyn preschooler was crushed by his school bus today after slipping on a patch of ice. Little 4-year-old Amron Altman died just feet from his front door in Borough Park as his 13-year-old brother looked on in horror as the back wheels of the bus ran over the fallen child. This is a very, very sad situation. And, unlike most pedestrian run-overs in the city, the driver does not appear to have done anything wrong. By all accounts, the death was just a horrible tragedy. Investigators said the driver, who works for the Yeshiva Bais Chaim Yoshua, did not see the boy and his brother when he pulled up to the family’s three-story brick rowhouse. The child had just climbed a snowbank and slipped beneath the front and rear wheels. The driver had no idea what happened until he was flagged down a few blocks away.
In a city where homicides have fallen to a record low, it may be overlooked that there are numerous ways to be killed in New York — and those who die by accident have done so in numbers remarkably constant over the years. The police searched off Coney Island in 2008 for missing swimmers. Eight people drowned that year in the city, a report says. Some are claimed by the sea: In 2007, four people were killed in watercraft accidents, including two men who died when their fishing boat struck a cable stretched between a tugboat and a barge near Coney Island. Fourteen more drowned that year. Some fall victim to the weather: 10 died of exposure to excessive natural heat in 2008; 11 others died of exposure to the cold, according to records recently released by the city’s health department. And while city officials have celebrated historic declines in homicides and fire-related deaths, the city has not made similar gains in overall accidental deaths. In 2008, of the 54,193 people who died in the city, 1,044 deaths (excluding drug overdoses) were classified by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as accidental — an 8.8 percent decline from 1998, when there were 1,145 accidental deaths. In contrast, the number of homicides fell 17.5 percent in that same period. The contrast is more stark going back to 1993: accidental deaths have fallen by 30.1 percent, while homicides have dropped by 73.2 percent. City officials track the accidental deaths, rank them and study them with an eye toward developing interventions for certain dangers and to “decrease these situations,” said Bonnie Kerker, an assistant commissioner in the health department’s Bureau of Epidemiology Services.Henny Ray Abrams/Associated Press
An 11-year-old boy died in a fire Tuesday that ripped through a Coney Island high-rise apartment. The child was home alone when the fire erupted. The cause was not immediately known, officials said. I would like to know what an 11 year old boy was doing home alone in the first place? Neighbors said he lived with his grandmother, who apparently had stepped out to go to the store moments before the fire started. Hours earlier, a 60-year-old grandmother died after surging flames trapped her inside her Queens apartment. Deborah Kelly could not escape her home on the 17th floor of a Lefrak City building when flames ripped through her living room and blocked the front door, witnesses said. A neighbor went up to the woman’s door and felt the heat so he knew it was coming from her apartment. The cause of the fire remains under investigation, but doesn’t appear suspicious, FDNY officials said. In situations like this, where the cause of the blazes is not immediately evident, it would be wise for the families of the deceased to contact a lawyer in New York who specializes in handling cases like this. My advice to the families: Don’t speak to anyone, especially their insurance agency, until they contact a lawyer.
It appears as if the White House is backing off of plans to hold the civil trial for the 9/11 bombers in New York City. According to news reports today, he still wants to hold the trial in civil court, just not near the site of the original attack. I suspect that a big part of the Presidents change of heart centers on the safety of office workers and residents who live and work in the vicinity of the court house where the trial was scheduled to be held. As much as I would like to see these monsters tried, convicted and then burned at the stake in the neighborhood that bore the brunt of their evil, the President should not overlook the possible consequences to the city should the trial take place in lower Manhattan. Should something happen, not only are city residents more vulnerable to injury and death, but as we’ve seen in the case of the 9/11 tragedy, the city would also leave itself open to a mountain of personal injury law suits that would no doubt ensue in the wake of any retaliatory action by the terrorists. Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said when specifically asked about the trial options, ”Without illuminating all of the factors that are involved, first and foremost, there are…security concerns, logistical concerns about where you would hold the trial in New York, what that would mean for the downtown area, that have to be taken into account.”
Everyone knows how dangerous it is to be a construction worker, a cop, a firefighter or a correction officer in New York City. But few people realize the hazards that come with the job of Sanitation Department worker. Fact is, we seldom hear about men who are injured, even killed, in the process of doing the dirty job of keeping the city clean. I would hope that these men — I say men because I’ve never seen a woman sanitation worker in all of the years I’ve lived in the city — have recourse to the same legal remedies as do construction workers who are injured by accidents on the job. New Yorkers got a sad reminder of just how risky sanitation work can be when veteran Sanitation Department worker Frank Justich was struck and killed while picking up sidewalk trash bins in Astoria, Queens. Justich was the tenth sanitation worker to die in the line of duty, according to Sanitation Department officials.
An under-construction power plant blew up Sunday in a stupendous explosion that killed five workers and shook the ground for miles around. The media referred to the day prior to the explosion as “A normal workday,” that suddenly turned to carnage and death when a gas line exploded without warning at the plant south of Hartford. If you ask any personal injury lawyer they’ll tell you no workdays are normal on a construction site. What they’ll tell you, based on years of experience handling cases for hardhats injured and killed in the line of duty, that construction sites are never normal. They are dangerous places. In this instance, injuries and death to workers weren’t caused by a fallen crane or a broken scaffold. This time men were sent down a hole to fix what they thought was a gas leak. Workers at the scene told The New York Daily News that they saw a man without a head. “Some of them are real bad.” A dozen workers were hospitalized after the blast at the Kleen Energy Plant, which was nearing completion in Middletown, a college town about 15 miles south of Hartford. Dogs were searching the rubble for more victims.
I’m trying to wrap my mind around this whole sordid trend we’ve seen repeated time and again where a law enforcement official gets caught torturing and humiliating a male perpetrator by jamming a police baton up his rectum. What is that all about? Where is Sigmund Freud when you need him? I certainly can’t make head nor tale (no pun intended) of this kind of behavior – and by men who are often referred to as New York City’s finest. Testifying against his fellow officers today, Kevin Maloney, 27, a transit cop, told jurors he saw Officer Richard Kern use his retractable baton to sodomize Michael Mineo after he’d been arrested in a Brooklyn subway station for smoking pot. For smoking pot? That’s all the man was doing? Smoking pot. Not robbing someone. Or trying to push another passenger onto the tracks. Maloney said one of the transit offers placed a police baton into a man’s rectum while they tried to arrest him. “It was pressed on Michael Mineo’s left buttock. I saw the baton move from left to right,” Maloney said during testimony at Brooklyn Supreme Court. “I saw it move from left to right. Yes, there was pressure being applied.” After being found guilty on criminal charges, I hope Mineo finds the best personal injury attorney in New York and sues the officer, and the City of New York, for as much money as he can get for his pain and suffering…and for no apparent reason or provocation.