Boston Accident Lawyer Blog

“A dog is man’s best friend.” That maxim has a lot of truth in it – dogs truly can be the kind of friend many people wish they had in their human relationships: Loyal, understanding, forgiving, compassionate. I myself have always loved dogs (though the less noise they make, the better.)

But it’s also true that man’s best friend can get ugly at times – often very unpredictably. When that happens, when a dog attacks a person – horrific physical and psychological injuries can often result. A dog’s teeth are extremely sharp, and their ability to inflict devastating injuries was given to them by their generic ancestors – wolves and prairie dogs. Most dogs can bite with incredible speed and ferocity. Their teeth are built to tear the flesh off of their victims or attackers with their powerful jaws. That’s not how most people see their own or their neighbor’s pet, but that is how evolution created them. Clearly, some breeds, such as pit bulls, are notorious for being unpredictably violent, but as a Dedham, Massachusetts dog bite lawyer, I can assure you that all dogs have it within them to be violent if provoked.

An example of this was seen recently with the pre-trial case settlement of a dog bite case in Massachusetts. The plaintiff was a 23-year-old woman, who was invited to a friend’s home along with two other friends. Why were they invited? To bid farewell to the friend’s dog, which was scheduled to be euthanized (i.e., put to sleep) the next day. Sounds kind of touching, doesn’t it? It would have been, but for the exception of one slight detail: The plaintiff’s friend never told the plaintiff that the reason the dog was going to be put to sleep, was that the dog had attacked her (the friend) just one week earlier. Just a minor detail ….

While at the house, the friend asked her mother to take a picture of all the women with the dog. While the women were in the process of posing for the picture, the dog suddenly attacked the plaintiff, biting her face, tearing into her lips and nose. As an example of just how much damage a dog can inflict in just a couple of seconds, so much skin and tissue were torn off the plaintiff’s face that the defendant and the other women present were able to retrieve two large pieces of human tissue torn from the plaintiff’s face, which they took to the hospital after the attack. Luckily, specialist cosmetic surgeons were able to reconstruct the plaintiff’s lips by using the recovered tissue and a separate skin graft. After the initial surgery, the plaintiff required additional surgery several months later to further repair the damage from the attack. Despite these efforts, the plaintiff ended up with permanent facial scarring, and suffered severe psychological damage necessitating psychotherapy and psychiatric medication. This case settled approximately one month prior to trial.

Thankfully, there is a special statute in Massachusetts that imposes liability on the owner of a dog for Massachusetts dog bites and dog attacks. The statute is found in Massachusetts General Laws Ch. 140, §155 (known in legal circles as the “Massachusetts Dog Bite Statute”). Commonly, coverage for this kind of liability is provided through the dog owners’ homeowners’ insurance policy (and sometimes renters’ insurance policies.) For the plaintiff here, her case settled approximately one month before trial.

If no liability insurance policy is available, and if the defendant were either not willing or not able to settle the case using his own financial resources, then a plaintiff would have to proceed to trial. If successful in securing a favorable verdict and financial judgment either before a jury or a judge, the plaintiff would then have to attach any assets the defendant might have, and seek to liquidate those assets to satisfy the judgment. Doing this can be very difficult and time-consuming.

So, the lessons from a case like this are two-fold, for both dog owners and non-owners: If you own a dog, check with your homeowners (or renters) insurance company to make sure that your policy provides coverage for dog bites. And if you don’t own a dog but do like dogs, just be sure to always use caution when approaching someone else’s dog, or a dog whose disposition you are unfamiliar with. No amount of potential future financial settlement is worth suffering a dog attack.

If you or someone you know has suffered a dog bite or been attacked by a dog, contact us for a free consultation. We are very experienced in these kinds of cases, and can provide you with the best advice that you can get.

Much of life can be cruel, and even ironic. So it was that a 17 year-old boy, who was only weeks away from getting his much-awaited driver’s’ license, was killed last Thursday while skateboarding in Taunton, Massachusetts. Nicholas Silva-Thomas was killed by a car driven by a hit-and-run driver, as yet unidentified.

The youth was skateboarding on Bay Street in Taunton, after leaving Watson Park with other skateboarding friends to go to a pizza shop. At about 9:40 PM, as Silva-Thomas was skateboarding on a street he hoped to be driving on in the near future, he was struck by a driver who fled the scene and abandoned the youth, lying in the street with a fatal head injury. Witnesses said that not only did the driver leave the scene, he or she turned their lights off while doing so, to make the license plate on the car harder for any witnesses to see. No one was able to identify the license plate as the car sped away. Hopefully, there really is a thing called hell, and hopefully, there is a spot reserved for people like this driver.

This is a tragic story, but if it can do any good at all, let it illustrate the enormous and grave dangers connected with not only skateboarding as a sport, but skateboarding and Massachusetts motor vehicle accidents. I am fully aware that skateboarding has become very popular in recent years. When I was a kid, in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, skateboarding was popular, then it fell out of vogue. In the past ten years or so, it’s come back with a rage. Michael J. Fox made it popular in 1986's "Back To The Future” - though his skills were computer-animated. I understand the thrill of sports like this, and I understand kids (like many adults) want thrills. The problem is that seemingly all caution is thrown to the wind with so many of these activities: A reminder: No matter how adept at using a skateboard, no one can navigate, turn, or stop on these things with the same precision as even a bike. In an emergency, you cannot evade or escape a collision with anywhere near an “acceptable” margin of safety while on a skateboard.

Even worse, very few skateboarders wear protective helmets. Tragically, Silva-Thomas wasn’t wearing a helmet, either. (Now that it’s summer, I see this “derring-do” attitude all the time at the beach by kids with skim-boards. Ever see that “sport”? – A user throws an ultra-thin boogie board, about 3 feet long, into the water washing up on the sand. Once on a thin film of water, the person runs toward the board, jumps on it, and “slides” as the board flips forward, usually in the air. I’ve seen more kids flip upside down and land on their backs and necks than I can believe. This “sport” is an open invitation to a Christopher Reeve-like broken neck.)

As a plaintiffs' product liability lawyer, this makes me think of a very similar summer/seasonal toy that was manufactured in the 1960’s: The "Slip and Slide.” Following several successful lawsuits following the often-serious injuries this toy caused, it was gratefully taken off the market. This was one of the first product liability lawsuits against toy manufacturers.

Making matters even worse for the family of young Silva-Thomas, is the fact that, as the driver who hit the youth has not yet been found, any auto insurance coverage that might be available to compensate for this fatality would be limited to the uninsured or under-insured driver benefits that would be provided by any car owned and insured by the youth’s parents or family. Unless optional coverages are purchased, this coverage is usually limited to $20,000 per person, or $40,000 per accident.

This tragedy again illustrates these maxims: 1) All Massachusetts drivers should carry “Bodily Injury Caused By An Uninsured Auto” coverage of at least $250,000 per person/$500,000 per accident (Part 3 on your policy Coverage Selections page); and 2) All Massachusetts drivers should also carry “Optional Bodily Injury To Others” coverage of at least $250,000 per person/$500,000 per accident. The first of the above, (1) protects you if are injured by either a hit-and-run driver or a driver that carries only the minimum standard coverages of $20,000 per person/$40,000 per accident, but you have damages that exceed the standard minimum coverage of $20,000/$40,000; The second of the above, (2) protects you if you injure someone else with your car, and the victim’s damages exceed $20,000 per person/$40,000 per accident. All this is further explained in detail on my web site, on the Massachusetts Car Accidents Page. If you accidentally injured someone with your car or have been injured by another driver, or if you just have some general questions, contact us for a free initial consultation. We can answer your questions and provide you with the best guidance possible in this area of law.

My thoughts and sympathies go out to the Silva-Thomas family.

POST-SCRIPT: As of the time this post is being published, (Sun., 8/7/11, 11:30 PM,) I have learned that authorities in the Taunton Police Department have made an arrest in this case. Paul Baran, 55,of Taunton, was arrested earlier today (Sunday.) Baran faces a charge of leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death. Police say they developed necessary information Saturday night that led them to the vehicle that struck young Silva-Thomas, and to Baran. As an attorney who is also a Dedham criminal defense lawyer, I should say here that Baran must be presumed innocent until he is either proven guilty or pleads guilty to this offense. But if either of these outcomes occur, he will not only have to deal with the law, he will have to deal with his conscience.

Scientists at the Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife in Boston, Massachusetts released a study today that indicates that nursing home patients who are given SSRI antidepressants are at increased risk of suffering falls. SSRI’s are a class of anti-depressants known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, which in general act to increase levels of serotonin in the brain. Common names for these drugs include Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, Celexa, and Zoloft.

The study, published in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, examined 1,181 cases of nursing home falls. The study reportedly discovered a five-fold increase in patient falls within 48 hours of receiving a new SSRI, or being administered higher doses of an existing SSRI that they were already taking. However, the rate appeared to decrease each day after the prescription change. In a press release, Dr. Sarah D. Berry, a scientist at the Institute for Aging Research of Hebrew Senior Life and the lead author of the study, said that “Our results identify the days following a new prescription or increased dose of a non-SSRI antidepressant as a window of time associated with a particularly high risk of falling among nursing home residents." Berry theorized that the increased risk of falling after receiving an SSRI might be due to coordination problems caused by the medications. Berry commented that the benefits of these medications may still outweigh the increased risk of falling, so long as patients are closely monitored in the days immediately following administration of the drugs.

These findings are important because far too many nursing home patients are prescribed antidepressants, because they exhibit symptoms of depression. Ask yourself: What nursing home resident have you ever met who wouldn’t have reason to be depressed? If the average American knew what life (or more accurately, “existence,”) was really like in a nursing home, they’d be shocked. The response of most Primary Care Physicians and nursing home medical directors to dealing with the predictable depression that results when a patient is placed in a nursing home, is to put the patients on yet another medication – antidepressants. This practice has even increased in the recent past, now that medical studies have proven that administering anti-psychotic medications to nursing home residents suffering from dementia produces an increased risk of death to patients suffering from dementia. For years, patients suffering from senility and Alzheimer’s Disease were routinely prescribed anti-psychotics, due to the symptoms the disease would cause. Finally, medical studies proved that giving anti-psychotic medications to dementia patients could be fatal, so doctors switched over to prescribing these same patients antidepressants. Now, new research shows that antidepressants can cause elderly patients to lose their balance and suffer debilitating falls.

All this illustrates a broader, and far more important point: Too many nursing home medical staffs just throw darts when it comes to treating patients: They aren’t really sure that a given medication will help a patient, but then again they aren’t sure – so they reach for almost any psychoactive medication that will help “keep the patient quiet.” And the irony is that such a generalized, non-specific approach only increases the nursing home operator’s liability exposure – as prescribing antidepressants to seniors will do, if the effect is to make injuries from falls that much more likely. But that doesn’t seem to stop them.

As a Dedham Massachusetts nursing home abuse lawyer, I can assure my readers: If you have a loved one who is in a nursing home, make yourself known to the staff as someone who is there on a regular basis – and as someone who is always watching. Don’t ever stop making regular visits to your loved one – and make it clear when you are there, that you are watching everything in relation to the care (and medication management) of the patient. Otherwise, if you visit rarely or infrequently, the staff will come to know that – and the care and attention that your loved one receives will very likely drop down on their list of priorities. That’s one of those things that no nursing home administrator or owner will ever admit, but it’s true.

If a relative or someone you care about is in a nursing home and you suspect that he or she may be a victim of neglect or abuse, contact us for a free consultation. We are experts in this complex area of law, and can give you the advice you need.