A 26-year-old motorcyclist was riding down a quiet residential street in Sun Valley at about 30 miles per hour, headlight on, well within the limit. A driver backed a company pickup out of a driveway and into his path, and he was killed on impact. This motorcycle left turn wrongful death case became a fight over what the driver could have seen, and for how long, before that truck ever entered the road.
$36.5M
Los Angeles jury verdict
0%
Fault assigned to our client
6 sec
Clear sightline the driver had before impact
On March 27, 2019, our client was riding on Bradley Avenue, a residential street with a 35 mile per hour limit, when a driver backing a company pickup insured for $10 million pulled out of a driveway directly into his path. He had no chance to avoid the collision and was killed. The street offered a clear, unobstructed view in the direction he was traveling, which became the center of the case.
The defense built on three arguments. It claimed our client was speeding at about 60 miles per hour. It pointed to a trace of methamphetamine in his blood and called it a cause of the crash. And it argued he had "come out of nowhere," so the driver could not have seen him in time.
Each argument was tested with physical evidence rather than accepted on the driver's account.
Our expert Steven Anderson, an MIT-trained engineer and former lead designer at Buell Motorcycles, used a validated crash-test regression on 11.4 inches of door crush to reconstruct the real speed at about 30 miles per hour, matching the limit.
We established that the trace amount was not a substantial factor in the crash. The jury agreed and found it was not a substantial factor.
A 3D reconstruction with the truck's own event data recorder showed a full six seconds of clear sightline before impact, and that the driver never touched the brakes while backing from 1 to 6 miles per hour into the road.
With each theory answered, the jury placed all of the fault on the driver.
Cases where a vehicle backs out of a driveway or turns across an oncoming motorcyclist usually turn on visibility and timing. A driver who says a rider appeared without warning is making a claim that can be tested with reconstruction, 3D modeling, and event data recorder evidence rather than simply accepted. Six seconds is an enormous amount of time on the road. The reconstruction turned the case from a dispute over eyewitness impressions into an objective, second-by-second timeline the jury could see for themselves.
On September 16, 2022, after trial in Los Angeles Superior Court (Case No. 19STCV10659), the jury returned its verdict. The case was tried by Arash Homampour and Ronan Duggan of The Homampour Law Firm with co-counsel Jason Halpern of Halpern & Associates.
The breakdowns below cover the right-of-way law, the black-box evidence, the heirs' claims, the backing-driver duty, and expert selection.
We try catastrophic motorcycle and wrongful death cases as counsel or co-counsel and pay statutory referral fees.
Refer a caseA driver backed a company pickup out of a driveway directly into the path of our client's motorcycle on a residential street, giving him no opportunity to avoid the collision.
A validated crash-test regression based on 11.4 inches of door crush reconstructed our client's actual speed at about 30 miles per hour, matching the posted limit.
On September 16, 2022, a Los Angeles jury awarded $36.5 million, assigning zero fault to our client and finding the trace methamphetamine was not a substantial factor.
