It is sometimes said that no one likes attorneys until they need one. It can be easy to form negative opinions about lawyers based upon what you see a small minority doing in the news headlines. However, when you’re hurt and a powerful entity on the other side is inaccurately representing what happened in your accident in order to deny you the recovery you urgently need, you may feel overwhelmed or plain hopeless if you are without counsel. When that happens, you definitely need the services of the right Chicago car accident attorney. Your experienced injury lawyer can help you make sense of your case, take control and acquire the evidence you need (like eyewitnesses, forensic crash-scene evidence or video footage) to expose the truth.
An example of that type of situation happened recently in the Chicago suburb of Hometown. A Metra train crashed into a compact sedan one night at around 7:30 p.m. A WGN report indicated that, according to Metra, “the lights were flashing, the gates were down and other vehicles had stopped, but the female driver sped around the gates.” The accident critically injured three women inside the car. A 19-year-old male pedestrian struck by the car and died in a hospital two days later.
Obviously, if Metra’s description were true, that could be incredibly damaging to the court cases that the injured passengers and fatally injured pedestrian’s family might pursue against Metra, as it would indicate that the car’s driver, not Metra, was to blame for causing the accident. This is why you need ample resources on your side to discover all the favorable evidence that may be out there. The unfortunate reality is that, without strong evidence to contradict Metra’s description, may people might find the story of a relatively young driver in her 20s recklessly choosing to “beat” the train to be persuasive.
A video camera puts a new perspective on the accident
With the right additional proof, however, you may be able to weaken, or even completely debunk, the other side’s version of how the accident occurred. That was what happened in this Metra crash. A video camera that was mounted to the side of a nearby business’s building captured the accident and seemed to cast the nature of this fatal accident in a much different light than the statement Metra released. In the footage, the driver did not appear to have “sped around the gates.” The footage appeared to show a driver who was simply “positioned too far into the intersection,” according to WGN. The gates landed on the top of the stopped car’s trunk. The driver began to back up, but stopped after she appeared to contact the lowered gate. In what one might reasonably conclude was a moment of confusion and perhaps panic, the driver pulled forward and into the path of the oncoming train.
Obviously, any accident where people are critically injured or die is tragic. What is even more tragic is when the victims of those accidents and their families are prevented from getting the compensation they may desperately need because the other side presents erroneous, misleading or even outright false contentions, and the injured victims lack the evidence to debunk those assertions. Don’t let that be you or your loved one. Get the legal representation you need from the knowledgeable Chicago car accident attorneys at Katz, Friedman, Eisenstein, Johnson, Bareck & Bertuca. Our attorneys have been aggressively fighting for injured people for many years, and helping them get results. To set up a free case evaluation, contact us at 312-724-5846 or through our website.