South Florida Personal Injury Lawyers

AVON, Conn. (AP) _ The owner of a dump truck that slammed into a group of cars on Avon Mountain last year, killing four people and injuring 19 others, appeared in court Monday to face manslaughter and other charges.

David Wilcox, 71, who ran American Crushing & Recycling, was arrested at his Windsor home Sunday night.

In addition to four counts of manslaughter, Wilcox was charged with assault, tampering with evidence, fabricating evidence, interfering with police, and 23 motor vehicle violations.

Those include having defective brake parts on the truck, which went out of control coming down the mountain July 29, 2005. The driver died in the fiery crash.

(AP) - WASHINGTON-Pounding the pavement is getting a little easier on people’s knees in many cities around the country. For reasons of safety and ease of maintenance, Washington and dozens of other communities are installing rubber sidewalks made of ground-up tires.

The rubber squares are up to three times more expensive than concrete slabs but last longer, because tree roots and freezing weather won’t crack them. That, in turn, could reduce the number of slip-and-fall lawsuits filed over uneven pavement.

The shock-absorbing surface also happens to be easier on the joints of joggers, and more forgiving when someone takes a spill.

And the rubber sidewalks are considered more environmentally friendly: They offer a way to recycle some of the estimated 290 million tires thrown out each year in the U.S., and they do not constrict tree roots the way concrete slabs do.

“As our trees grow and mature sometimes the root systems begin to pull up the sidewalks,” said Michelle L. Pourciau, acting director of the D.C. Transportation Department. “This is compromise between having a beautiful and healthy tree and having a safe and passable sidewalk.”

Rubbersidewalks Inc. of Gardena, Calif., manufactures the small rubberized squares now being used on some sidewalks in more than 60 cities, including Washington.

Since 2001, Rubbersidewalks has been grinding thousands of old tires into crumbs, adding chemical binders, and baking the material into sidewalk sections that weigh under 11 pounds per square foot, or a quarter of the weight of concrete. The panels are available in two shades of gray and a terra cotta orange.

Many of the squares have been installed in areas where damage from tree roots, weather and snow removal have required sidewalk replacement or major repairs every three years, said Lindsay Smith, founder and president of Rubbersidewalks. Rubber sidewalks are expected to last seven years or more, Smith said.

The District of Columbia has spent about $60,000 to replace broken concrete with the rubberized panels here and there in a residential neighborhood northeast of the Capitol where towering willow oaks line the street.

“Maybe we won’t have to worry about the cracks in the sidewalk when the seasons change,” Charlene Baker said as she walked with her daughter. She added: “If this helps save the trees, that would be a good thing.”

The panels are firmer than a running track or a rubberized playground, but far more resilient than concrete.

Dr. Frank Kelly, a member of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in Macon, Ga., said people walking on the surface would be less vulnerable to heel spurs and knee and back problems.

In 2004, the sidewalks in front of two homes in New Rochelle, N.Y., were replaced after roots repeatedly caused concrete cracking and heaving. The rubber panels have withstood two winters of snow shoveling, rock salt and repeated freezing and thawing.

“Some of these trees are close to 100 years old and we wouldn’t want to take them down,” said Jeffrey Coleman, New Rochelle’s commissioner of public works.

About 100 feet of rubber sidewalk was installed in a town square-style shopping area in Tallahassee, Fla., in 2003 as a temporary measure after a major root pruning project.

“They wanted that to be in place for a year before we came back and put the concrete in,” said Tom Lewis, the city’s street maintenance and construction supervisor, “but the rubber has held up so well, we’ve just left it out there.”

Medical malpractice comes in all forms, including prescription errors. A new report from the Institute of Medicine found that, conservatively, there are 1.5 million medication errors each year including giving the wrong dose, giving medication to the wrong patient, and misreading labels and prescriptions. That amounts to one error per patient per day during hospital visits. These numbers do not include errors in the doctor’s office or patient errors at home.

Most errors do not result in injury, but the report cited a previous study that estimated 7,000 deaths per year due to medication errors. One high-profile case, also cited in the study, was that of Betsy Lehman who was a Boston Globe health reporter. She died in 1993 when her doctor mistakenly gave her four times her recommended chemotherapy dose during breast cancer treatment.

These mistakes lead to financial loss as well as health risks for patients as well. Serious injuries can add $5,800 per patient to the hospital bill, or $3.5 billion nationwide based on 400,000 “preventable” errors.

So what is being done to ensure these mistakes don’t happen? The answer is everything - and nothing. There are already ways of ensuring the right patient gets the right dose of the right medication, but the vast majority of hospitals do not use these systems. For example there are computer systems that can be used to manage patient medication in the hectic and high-volume hospital environment. This eliminates dose miscalculations and the need to “decipher” handwriting, which are often sources of errors. But only 6% of hospitals have such as system in place.

Another prevention method is bar coding of patient wristbands and medication doses. This way, nurses can confirm the medication with the patient before administering the dosage to further reduce errors. An author of the study noted that at one hospital using the bar code system, there were 74 incidents in a one-month period where the computer alerted nurses that they were about to give the wrong medication to the wrong patient. However, less than 15% of hospitals use any type of bar coding.

In fact many hospitals still do not use Electronic Medical Records (EMR), relying on error-prone paper based records instead. This is the first step to computerizing medication management to reduce the number of errors - and medical malpractice claims. Hospitals state that switching to EMR and other computerized systems is complex and takes time. But in this day and age when even grandmothers use computers on a daily basis, how long can hospitals delay before they are seen to be negligent?

Medication errors can lead to severe injuries, even death. If you feel that you have been needlessly injured due to misread labels and other prescription errors, call Florida personal injury lawyer David I. Fuchs at 800-570-2858 for a free consultation.

The Alberts asked for $1.48 million for the expenses of raising and caring for these special needs children. These expenses include the specialized medical, educational and therapeutic needs the children require.

The jury found that Quackenbush and Adoptions With Love were negligent for failure to disclose, but Chosen Children and Cohen were not negligent. It found Quackenbush and Adoptions With Love 85% liable and the Alberts 15% liable. They jury awarded $484,000, which was reduced to $409,000. According to plaintiff’s counsel, this award will be reduced further to $104,000 due to set offs from insurance payments and other settlements. The plaintiffs also received prejudgment interest dating back to 1996 when the case was filed.

The Estate of Quackenbush and Adoptions With Love have filed post trial motions to set aside the verdict.

A Franklin County jury in Ohio awarded the family of a Columbus girl more than $17.8 million yesterday because of a medical mistake that left her requiring round-the-clock care.

The award is the largest in the county for a medical-malpractice case before a jury. The money is to cover the future medical costs, education and pain and suffering of Alexis Hayes, a 5-year-old whose brain was damaged before elective surgery at Children’s Hospital nearly five years ago.

Alexis cannot speak, has cerebral palsy and will use a wheelchair for life, one of her attorneys said. Doctors were preparing to remove a benign cyst from the neck of the then 4-month-old infant when something went wrong with the anesthesia on Sept. 25, 2001.

Her parents, Randy Jackson and Myrtle Hayes, of the South Side, filed a lawsuit in March 2003 against the hospital and several co-defendants.

The engaged couple hugged each other and cried yesterday as Common Pleas Judge Guy Reece read the verdicts finding an anesthesiologist and her company negligent.

“I’m so glad it’s over,” Jackson, 47, said of the three-week trial. “I knew it was a strong case. You can’t take a healthy baby and come out with brain damage without negligence.”

The couple care for three other children: Jackson’s 10-year-old twin boys and Hayes’ 14-year-old daughter, he said.

“We know now Alexis is going to be taken care of. She doesn’t communicate at all,” said Hayes, 30. “It takes 24 hours a day.”

The verdicts include $800,000 for each parent and $16,254,000 for Alexis. A courtappointed lawyer will act as guardian for the child and determine how her money is spent.

The hospital, which settled out of court during the trial on terms that were not disclosed, and lawyers for the anesthesiologists, argued that Alexis must have had a heart condition that had not been detected. However, jurors found that Dr. Sharon Benoit and her company, Children’s Anesthesia Associates Inc., were responsible for Alexis’ injuries.

Jurors cleared a second anesthesiologist, Dr. Laura Dexter, of liability. She was called in to assist after Alexis’ problems first appeared.

Dexter has since moved to Minnesota, her attorney said.

Before the 12:30 p.m. surgery, the girl’s blood pressure and heart rate dropped as she was being given anesthesia; the medical team gave her stimulants and performed CPR for at least one minute, medical records show.

Once she was stabilized, Benoit tried to anesthetize her again, a mistake that resulted in permanent brain damage, according to the family’s attorneys, Thomas J. O’Connell and Lawrence Abramson.

“Our position was she (Benoit) needed to stop at 12:35. Instead, she induced her with more anesthesia,” O’Connell said outside the courtroom.

Benoit, 44, failed to let Alexis recover properly from the first attempt to administer anesthesia and didn’t respond quickly to warning signs that something was wrong, jurors found with their verdicts.

She was not in court when the verdicts were read. Her attorney, Peter VanLigten, told the judge he will appeal.

Steve Chappelear, who has studied jury verdicts for the Columbus Bar Association, confirmed that the award smashes the previous medicalmalpractice record of $12 million, which a Franklin County jury awarded in 1990.

“It’s certainly the highest in the county and the secondlargest in the state after a $30 million award in Cuyahoga County in 2004,” Chappelear said, referring only to medicalmalpractice cases. The largest jury award for any case locally was $25.7 million in an agediscrimination case in 2002, he said.

In a prepared statement, Children’s Hospital said it stands by Dr. Benoit’s record.

“With compassion for this precious child and her family, Columbus Children’s Hospital respectfully disagrees with the jury’s decision regarding the cause of this child’s tragic current medical condition,” the statement said. Dr. Benoit “provides high-quality care to the children she serves.”

A spokeswoman for the hospital said Alexis is still cared for by doctors at Children’s Hospital.

(AP) - ORLANDO, Fla.-A man helped rescue his son by performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation underwater after the boy got sucked to the bottom of a hotel hot tub, authorities said.

Aljuwon Pipkin, 14, was released from the hospital last week, a week after the July 13 incident.

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office said he may have been immersed anywhere from five to 15 minutes.

“I get chills now even speaking about it,” father Sharif Pipkin told WKMG-TV on Thursday. “I figured he was at the bottom and they just couldn’t pull him up, and then he didn’t come up. And, I pulled again and he didn’t come up. I began to holler for help from people.”

Officials said a grate at the bottom of the tub became dislodged, creating a strong suction that pulled him underwater.

As others jumped in to pull the New Jersey teen from the bottom of the tub, Pipkin’s father began trying to breathe air into his son’s mouth, authorities said.

Pipkin was transported to Florida Hospital South in critical condition, and doctors initially feared he suffered brain damage. Sheriff’s officials said it took a couple of days to drain the water from his lungs, but he was expected to make a full recovery.

“I just remember going down to the pool and then waking up in the hospital,” Aljuwon Pipkin told WKMG. “I can appreciate life more. It makes you want to work harder for things.”

(AP) - FAIR HAVEN, New York-A 6-year-old girl was airlifted to a hospital after she got her leg stuck in a pipe at a public bathroom.

Alexyss DeWind stepped into the 4-inch floor drain in a bathroom at Fair Haven Beach State Park on Sunday afternoon and got caught up to her thigh. Firefighters tried to grease the pipe, but finally had to cut the concrete around it to free her.

She was flown by helicopter to a Rochester hospital with her leg still in the cast-iron pipe and doctors, helped again by firefighters, worked overnight to cut it away before discharging her Monday.

Wendy Gibson, spokeswoman for the state Parks Department, said DeWind and her twin brother had removed a grate covering the drain before the girl got stuck. Gibson said Monday that the girl was fully recovered and back at the park, where her family was camping.

(AP) - CHICAGO-A passenger jet taking off at O’Hare International Airport came within 300 feet of a cargo plane that had just landed, federal aviation officials said.

United Airlines Flight 1015 was able to fly over the Boeing 747 cargo plane, which was on an intersecting runway about 10 p.m. Sunday, and no injuries were reported, the FAA said in a written statement.

Controller error was to blame, the FAA statement said. Both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the incident, known as a runway incursion.

The United flight was carrying 120 passengers and five crew members to Denver, said Brandon Borrman, a spokesman for the Elk Grove Village-based carrier.

So far this year, O’Hare, the nation’s busiest airport, has had five reported runway incursions amid about 540,000 total flights, the FAA said. Last year, it had seven.

Wendy Abrams, a spokeswoman for the city’s aviation department, says the incidents are rare, considering the airport handles roughly one million flights a year.

“This is abnormal,” she said.

(AP) - SAN DIEGO-All 4,800 crew members of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and 1,200 family and friends will be screened for tuberculosis because an initial round of tests showed a small number of people were infected, Navy officials said.

The initial tests were conducted after a 32-year-old sailor was hospitalized two weeks ago with active tuberculosis. He had been aboard the ship when it returned to San Diego on July 6 after a six-month deployment.

Families and friends were on the ship for the last leg of its voyage, from Hawaii to San Diego.

The Navy tested 776 people who might have met the infected sailor and 34 - 4.4 percent - tested positive, Capt. Frank Chapman said.

However, none of the 34 showed symptoms of active tuberculosis and were not contagious, Chapman said. Less than 1 percent of those who test positive develop the active disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The infected sailor has been released from the San Diego Naval Medical Center but will remain in quarantine at home until he is no longer considered infectious, military officials said.