Atlanta Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

Moments or minutes before you possibly hear a siren, a police officer on the patrol has received a call requiring his/her services. On these occasions and in most of the situations – particularly emergencies – the police officer will generally flip on his police lights and siren and speed to the scene. In a minority of cases, the police may be involved in a chase whereby he/she is actually chasing another automobile from the location of a crime. It is in these situations that innocent bystanders, pedestrians, motorists or passengers may injured even though they are not directly involved in the chase.

In fact, this is exactly what happened this past Saturday at approximately 5 p.m. when a police chase involving an Atlanta Police Department officer identified as Joshua Seick, resulted in damages and injuries in Southwest Atlanta to innocent victims at the intersection of Cascade Road and Fairburn Road (a popular and well traveled intersection) in Fulton County, Georgia. The officer had received a call for assistance and was traveling at a high speed when he/she impacted a BMW at, near or in the intersection and subsequently another vehicle containing a mother and her two children inside.

Witnesses report that the force of the impact was so strong that it caused the patrol vehicle to catch fire. The photographs taken at the scene show a police vehicle with extensive front-end damage that shows intrusion into the driver’s area of the vehicle. Ms. Kenyatta White, the mother of the two children, opined that the “…police car came across there too fast and it just happened so fast.” The officer and driver of the BMW were taken to area hospitals with serious injuries.

The question remains…how does the operator of the BMW recover for property damage, bodily injury and pain and suffering against the police officer for the high-speed chase? In Georgia, the answer lies in the Georgia Tort Claims Act, which allows personal injury claims against the government.
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It seems that every major holiday we hear or read of an injury caused by the improper use of a personal watercraft (PWC) on the lakes of Georgia. Typically, these events occur on high traffic inland lakes such as Lake Lanier and Alatoona. Yesterday, July 21, 2012, the stepson of Usher, the R&B singer, succumbed to his injuries as the result of a traumatic incident involving a watercraft on Lake Lanier.

The weather following the holiday period of July 4th was a hot one. It was expected that a substantial number of folks would flock to and use Lake Lanier. As expected, Lake Lanier had heavy traffic of powerboats, sailboats, jet skis and other personal watercraft.

It was during this period that Kile Glover, an 11-year-old, had come to Lake Lanier with a group of people to take part boating on the lake. Kile had waited his turn to be pulled on the inter tube behind the powerboat. Kile got into the water and secured himself to the inter tube. At some point during the period that he was being pulled on the inter tube by the powerboat, a man who was part of the same group and who has been identified as Frank Hubbard of Atlanta, negligently operated a jet ski in violation of state law and struck Kile and another person on the lake causing injuries to both including a traumatic brain injury to Kile.
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A report prepared by Cambridge Systematics, Inc. in Besthesda, Maryland for AAA was released in November of 2011 and focused on the costs of traffic congestion and the costs of injuries from traffic collisions. The three key findings (based on 2009 traffic data across the country) in the report included the following: the total cost of traffic crashes was 3x more than the cost of congestion ($299.5 billion for crashes and $97.7 billion for congestion); the crash costs per person exceeded the costs of congestion in every city studied; and the costs of crashes per person actually decreases as the size of the metropolitan area increases.
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