South Florida Personal Injury Lawyers

A church busy carrying nearly a dozen children ran off a rural highway and overturned, injuring nine people, officials said Thursday.The bus crashed into a tree as it ran off the highway in Pickens County, located in the northwest part of the state, Highway Patrol Lance Cpl. Scot Edgeworth said. He said there was fog in the area but didn’t know if that contributed to the crash.

“We were riding down the road and I felt a little bump and all of a sudden, the lights went out and we started rolling and the windows started busting,” 10-year-old Austin Moore told WYFF-TV. “Everybody started screaming and flying around bus.”

One child was in critical condition, and another was listed as serious at Greenville Memorial Hospital following the Wednesday night crash, spokeswoman Karen Gecewich said. The bus driver and two other students were also taken to that hospital but were either in fair condition or had been released, she said.

It was not immediately clear where the other children were taken.

The bus was taking the children home after a service at Lakeview Baptist Church. A woman who answered the phone there referred calls to the preacher, who was not in Thursday morning.

Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton is entitled to nearly $85,000 to pay his legal costs in a defamation lawsuit brought by a friend of Lindsay Lohan.Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, also can receive an additional $2,000 if he requests it, Superior Court Judge Elihu M. Berle ruled Wednesday.

“Perez Hilton will take steps to make sure every dime is collected,” said his lawyer, Bryan J. Freedman. “This should make one careful before filing a lawsuit against him.”

Samantha Ronson, who sued Hilton last year, was a passenger in Lohan’s car when it crashed into a tree in Beverly Hills in May. She sued Hilton for repeating on his Web site a report from another site stating that she planted cocaine that was found in Lohan’s car.

The judge removed Hilton from the lawsuit last November after the blogger’s attorneys argued he was protected by free speech rights.

Ronson’s attorney, David M. Bass, unsuccessfully argued that Hilton’s lawyers’ fees were excessive and that he should get no more than $13,400 to recover his legal costs.

Bass said Wednesday he was considering whether to take further legal action.

“We would like an opportunity for the court to consider all the facts,” he said.

One of the biggest civil court cases to land in Bell County begins this morning with jury selection as the family of a Killeen woman is suing the designers of a seatbelt used in a General Motors vehicle.

The family of Jenny Singley, specifically her widowed husband, Harold “Chip” Singley, is suing Killeen resident William Rogerson for wrongful death and damages in the death of Singley in a March 17, 2005, car wreck in Harker Heights. Rogerson already has pleaded guilty to the criminal charge of second-degree manslaughter.

In addition to the driver of the vehicle, Singley’s family also is suing the maker and designer of the seatbelt, TRW Vehicle Safety Systems, who the plaintiffs argue are responsible for the seatbelt’s failure to function correctly.

Singley, who was driving a Saturn L300, was hit by Rogerson’s vehicle, which had swerved out of control, according to court records, and struck the driver’s side front of Singley’s car. Singley’s 14-year-old son, who was in the passenger seat of the car, and Rogerson, the driver of the out-of-control vehicle, walked away from the accident with only minor injuries. Singley suffered massive head trauma, including a cracked skull, which lead to her eventual death, according to the medical examiner’s report.

Court records show that the wreck left Singley hospitalized and non-communicative for more than 18 months before she succumbed to her injuries at an area hospital late 2006.

Until the end of last week, the automotive giant General Motors had been listed as a defendant in the case for the company’s role in assisting in the design of the seatbelt. But Jeff Meyerson, the Singley family’s attorney, said Monday that GM had been removed from the lawsuit.

Meyerson, from the Austin-based Meyerson Law Firm, said he was not willing to comment on why GM was removed at the last minute as a defendant in the case. He would not confirm whether a settlement was reached.

He did say that the family is seeking in excess of $1 million, the figure assigned to the estimated medical bills for Singley’s 18-month hospital stay.

Meyerson said the decision for the jury will be fairly simple, in principle at least.

“The jury is going to decide whether the seatbelt failed,” Meyerson said Monday. “She had severe fracture to the backside of her head. She was in a nursing home for 18 months before she passed away from her injuries. Her medical bills are in excess of $1 million. She was coherent that she could feel pain, but she couldn’t communicate. It was extremely painful for the family.”

Meyerson did not elaborate on any punitive damages the family may be seeking, nor did he comment on any monetary reimbursement beyond the medical bills.

“The plaintiff’s position was that the seatbelt failed to lock,” Meyerson said. The other side contends that the seatbelt functioned correctly.

Rogerson pleaded guilty in a statement to being responsible for the wreck, and was scheduled for a sentencing hearing last Friday for the criminal charge of second-degree manslaughter, which carries a punishment range of two to 20 years in prison. The sentencing was reset for February.

Meyerson said the outcome of the civil case could have a bearing on sentencing in the criminal case.

“His best defense is our case,” Meyerson said. “There is no dispute that the accident was caused by him … there is no dispute that the marks on (Singley) were different (than the marks found on the son sitting next to her).”

Jack Little, lead attorney for TRW Vehicle Safety Systems, could say very little Monday before the trial’s opening day, but did note that the plaintiff’s attorney in the case is attempting to shift the focus of the case to TRW, and away from the driver, Rogerson.

Scott Sealhoff, civil attorney for Rogerson, and Buck Harris, criminal attorney for Rogerson, could not be reached for comment Monday.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin this morning at 10 a.m., and opening statements for both sides should come this afternoon, heard by a jury and 146th District Court Judge Rick Morris, who is presiding over the case. The jury trial is expected to last at least two weeks.

A steel flagpole that broke and killed kindergartner Angel Pocock-Smith, 5, last year at Roosevelt Primary School was erected in 1921, rusted and obviously defective, says an attorney for the girl’s mother.

“This deterioration of the flagpole didn’t happen overnight,” said Robert Darling, an attorney representing the girl’s mother, Angela Smith-Johnson, in a wrongful death lawsuit against the Ferndale School District. “The pole had been painted and the rust marks showed through and showed the deterioration. It was a defective flagpole and (the school district) had sufficient knowledge and time to fix it.”

The girl’s mother declined to comment when contacted Tuesday.

The lawsuit seeks at least $25,000 for pain and suffering by Pocock-Smith’s surviving family members.

The flagpole had a lighting fixture attached to it that collected water for years and caused the pole to rust and corrode in that area, Darling said.

Though the steel of the flagpole was a quarter-inch thick, corrosion reduced the thickness in the area where it broke to less than 1 percent of its original thickness, according to the lawsuit.

“The school district needs to be held responsible for this little girl’s death,” Darling said. “That’s the way to prevent something like this from happening again.”

Angel Pocock-Smith of Oak Park was killed April 16, 2007, when the flag pole broke and hit her in the head as she played with schoolmates in a courtyard at the school at 2610 Pinecrest. The 40-foot pole snapped about 10 feet up from the ground and the girl died of massive head injuries. She was pronounced dead on arrival at William Beaumont Hospital.

The rust on the pole where it broke was noticed by police who responded to the scene and investigated the death, which was ruled accidental.

School Principal Dina Krause heard the flagpole snap from inside her office and ran into the courtyard, where she stayed with Pocock-Smith until emergency workers arrived.

“She was a precious little girl,” Krause said at the time. “She was kind of quiet and a good student … she got along well with the other students.”

Family members of the girl at the time described her as a brave child who liked Barbie dolls and butterflies and took karate lessons.

Grief counselors spoke with students and staff at the school following Angel’s death.

When reached Tuesday, Stephanie Hall, a spokeswoman for the school district, wouldn’t comment on the allegations in the lawsuit, which was filed earlier this month before Oakland County Circuit Judge Edward Sosnik.

“Our feelings in the school district about this accident haven’t changed since the day it happened,” Hall said. “We lost a student and we grieved as a community and individually when Angel died.”

A couple filed a lawsuit against a hospital alleging that it sent their stillborn fetus’s body with dirty laundry to the cleaners.The Huguley Memorial Medical Center of Fort Worth staff took 19 hours to find the missing body, which was unpreserved and by then had been crushed and disfigured, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Kourtney McGee of Cleburne went to Huguley in July because she was bleeding in her second trimester, then gave birth to Jacob Dwayne Robinson. According to the lawsuit, staff told McGee and the father, Milburn “Pete” Robinson of Alvarado, that the body would be taken the morgue.

But when the funeral director arrived, he was told the body could not be found. Hospital staff eventually determined that the body was sent to a commercial cleaner with the laundry, according to the lawsuit.

“How could this happen, that these parents lost their child, lost their son - then the hospital doesn’t have a procedure or policy in place for dealing with it?” the couple’s attorney John David Hart told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The lawsuit alleges gross negligence by Huguley, and says the family has suffered emotional distress and mental anguish. It seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Dallas attorney Michael Stewart, who is representing Huguley, denied the allegations and said the hospital did nothing inappropriate.

“Our sympathies go to a family obviously who had a stillborn situation. Everyone feels bad about that,” Stewart said. He declined to release more information because of the pending litigation.

In what’s being called a major advance in organ transplants, doctors say they have developed a technique that could free many patients from having to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.The treatment involved weakening the patient’s immune system, then giving the recipient bone marrow from the person who donated the organ. In one experiment, four of five kidney recipients were off immune-suppressing medicines up to five years later.

“There’s reason to hope these patients will be off drugs for the rest of their lives,” said Dr. David Sachs of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the research published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Since the world’s first transplant more than 50 years ago, scientists have searched for ways to trick the body to accept a foreign organ as its own. Immune-suppressing drugs that prevent organ rejection came into wide use in the 1980s. But they raise the risk of cancer, kidney failure and many other problems. And they have unpleasant side effects such as excessive hair growth, bloating and tremors.

Eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs is “a huge advance,” said Dr. Suzanne Ildstad, a University of Louisville immunology specialist who had no role in the work.

“It still needs some fine-tuning so that everyone who gets treated gets the same consistent outcome … It’s not the holy grail of tolerance yet,” she cautioned.

The results do not mean that it is safe for current transplant patients to go off their medicines. Doing so could lead to organ rejection and even death, doctors warn. And Sachs said the treatment will not solve the country’s organ shortage.

In the 1990s, Sachs showed the treatment could work in a kidney recipient who was a good genetic match. The woman, who had an organ and marrow transplant in 1998, has not needed anti-rejection drugs for a decade.

The new study involved five people who got kidneys from parents or siblings who had slightly different tissue types from the patients. Since many kidney transplants are similarly mismatched, there is hope more people might one day be spared immune-suppressing drugs.

The breakthrough has changed the life of a Los Angeles man who was one of Sachs’ patients.

Derek Besenfelder was born with a genetic kidney disease. After a year on dialysis, he decided to enroll in the experiment and received a kidney and marrow transplant from his mother in 2005. He took anti-rejection pills for eight months, but then was weaned from them. He has been drug-free for two years.

“I wanted to be off the drugs as soon as possible. I had this huge bloated face and didn’t feel comfortable going out in public,” said Besenfelder, 28, who works as a communications director for a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

Doctors have experimented with giving marrow before, during or after organ transplants, while also tinkering with patients’ immune systems to prime them to accept the new organs.

Sachs’ treatment involved weakening each kidney patient’s immune system with intravenous drugs several days before the transplant. After the transplant, the patient got an infusion of marrow from the donor to create a new immune system.

The stem cells from the marrow reprogram the body by allowing new immune cells to grow that don’t try to attack the donated organ.

The patients took anti-rejection drugs but were weaned several months later.

Four of the five patients developed a hybrid immune system - where recipient and donor cells live together in the body - for a short time. They were able to stop taking anti-rejection drugs and had healthy kidney function two to five years later.

In the one case that failed, the patient had a second kidney transplant and has been on medications since.

Some researchers such as Ildstad believe the “home run” breakthrough will come when more people respond to the treatment and keep the mixed immune system permanently.

Transplant pioneer Dr. Thomas Starzl of the University of Pittsburgh said donor cells appeared to persist in the bodies of the successful transplant recipients even if those cells were not readily detected.

As promising as the treatment is, Sachs said it won’t solve the country’s organ shortage problem. Nearly 98,000 people are on the waiting list, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

The study was funded by the Immune Tolerance Network, an international consortium of federal and advocacy groups. Sachs plans a follow-up study involving 15 to 20 patients at Massachusetts General and other hospitals.

In the same issue of the New England Journal, Stanford University doctors reported successfully inducing tolerance to a donor organ in a man who was born with one kidney.

Larry Kowalski, now 50, received a matching kidney and marrow from his brother in 2005 and was weaned off drugs six months later. He has been off medications for two years.

Unlike the Massachusetts General cases, doctors said Kowalski has maintained an immune system from his own cells and his brother’s. The research was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Steve Duplantis, a popular PGA Tour caddie known for bringing out the best in his players, was killed early Wednesday when he was struck by a taxi while crossing a street.Duplantis was in Del Mar when he stepped off a center median and into the path of a taxi, said Sgt. Randy Webb of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department. The 35-year-old Duplantis was pronounced dead on the scene.

He was working at the Buick Invitational for Eric Axley.

Axley was visibly shaken when he arrived at Torrey Pines and asked for a few days before he commented.

Duplantis was a free spirit after hours who was regarded as among the best caddies inside the ropes. Jim Furyk won four times early in his career with Duplantis on the bag. The caddie also steered Rich Beem to his first PGA Tour victory in the 1999 Kemper Open, and he was with Tommy Armour III when he set the PGA Tour’s 72-hole scoring record at the Texas Open in 2003.

Among the nicknames caddies gave Duplantis was “Asbestos,” because he was thought to be fireproof. Even though he often showed up late for work after a night on the town, his value as a caddie was too much for players to replace him.

“He was one of the better caddies,” Armour said. “That’s why he kept getting hired. He was very confident with what he said.”

Armour, however, feared Duplantis’ nightlife would land him in trouble.

“Am I shocked by this? No,” Armour said. “I tried several times to get him some help. And I told him in 2003, ‘Bud, if you don’t change, you’re going to die a tragic death.”

Duplantis and his nightlife exploits were prominently featured in a book titled, “Bud, Sweat and Tees,” a story primarily about Beem.

Beem and Duplantis were together only about six months, the first time at the 1999 Kemper Open, Beem’s first tour victory.

Beem, who later won the PGA Championship at Hazeltine, was informed of his death during the pro-am.

“He was the first person who showed me the value of a good caddie, which I now have,” Beem said. “You felt comfortable with him on the bag because he knew what to say. He was confident.”

Beem mostly remembered how Duplantis looked after his daughter, Sierra, who turned 12 this month. His marriage ended quickly, and at one point Duplantis was a single parent trying to keep his job as a caddie. He worked with Furyk for four years until he was fired for showing up late one time too many.

“He always lit up when talking about Sierra,” Beem said. “He always had current pictures of her in his wallet. For a lot of years, he was the only parent in her life. Yes, he liked to party. But that part of his life gets lost.”

The mood was somber on the putting green, where some caddies were waiting on their players.

“He was a throwback,” caddie Patrick Smith said. “He raised the level of every player he worked for. He could take guys who were marginal and they would play well.”

Hungry patrons at a Cracker Barrel got more than a meal when a minivan crashed into the front of the restaurant Wednesday night. Police said the woman’s foot slipped off the brake of her minivan as she was backing in close to the restaurant to pick up her disabled husband, whom she was trying to keep out of the rain. The minivan smashed through the front door of the establishment, injuring five people.Tyler Lucci said he tried to pull his friend’s mother out of the way but couldn’t get to her in time.

“She was going way too fast,” Lucci said. “There was no way to even pull her out.”

Lucci said her foot was pinned between the minivan and the front door. She was one of the five people injured, but none of the injuries was considered life-threatening.

A Pompano Beach man turned himself in to deputies after an investigation showed that he was driving more than 120 miles per hour the night he crashed into a rental car carrying a group of tourists, the Broward Sheriff’s Office said. Eric Parr, 33, showed up at the Broward Sheriff’s Office Main Jail Wednesday to face two counts of vehicular homicide and one count of reckless driving. After a nine-month investigation, investigators concluded that Parr was driving his black Corvette recklessly when he struck a white Chevy Monte Carlo at 1:38 a.m. on Powerline Road near the Palm-Aire Country Club on April 5.Jennifer Keesey, 33, of North Dakota and Renae Gustafson, 32, of Minnesota, were killed in the crash. Kristine Boike, also of Minnesota, who was in the right rear passenger’s seat, was seriously injured.

According to the BSO, the rental car was turning into the country club when the Corvette slammed into it, killing Keesey and Gustafson. The impact was so strong that the engine from the Monte Carlo was thrown from the frame of the vehicle and landed on the street. The Corvette went airborne crashing through the bushes of a nearby parking lot, according to BSO.

Parr, and his 38-year-old passenger, Elena McGrane, of Coconut Creek, were taken to the hospital that evening with non life-threatening injures.

Parr is being held at the BSO Main Jail on a $5,025 bond.

Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Adminstration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.

“No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three weeks,” said Dr. Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J.

Dr. Gochfeld analyzed the sushi for The Times with Dr. Joanna Burger, professor of life sciences at Rutgers University. He is a former chairman of the New Jersey Mercury Task Force and also treats patients with mercury poisoning.

The owner of a restaurant whose tuna sushi had particularly high mercury concentrations said he was shocked by the findings. “I’m startled by this,” said the owner, Drew Nieporent, a managing partner of Nobu Next Door. “Anything that might endanger any customer of ours, we’d be inclined to take off the menu immediately and get to the bottom of it.”

Although the samples were gathered in New York City, experts believe similar results would be observed elsewhere.

“Mercury levels in bluefin are likely to be very high regardless of location,” said Tim Fitzgerald, a marine scientist for Environmental Defense, an advocacy group that works to protect the environment and improve human health.

Most of the restaurants in the survey said the tuna The Times had sampled was bluefin.

In 2004 the Food and Drug Administration joined with the Environmental Protection Agency to warn women who might become pregnant and children to limit their consumption of certain varieties of canned tuna because the mercury it contained might damage the developing nervous system. Fresh tuna was not included in the advisory. Most of the tuna sushi in the Times samples contained far more mercury than is typically found in canned tuna.

Over the past several years, studies have suggested that mercury may also cause health problems for adults, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and neurological symptoms.

Dr. P. Michael Bolger, a toxicologist who is head of the chemical hazard assessment team at the Food and Drug Administration, did not comment on the findings in the Times sample but said the agency was reviewing its seafood mercury warnings. Because it has been four years since the advisory was issued, Dr. Bolger said, “we have had a study under way to take a fresh look at it.”

No government agency regularly tests seafood for mercury.

Tuna samples from the Manhattan restaurants Nobu Next Door, Sushi Seki, Sushi of Gari and Blue Ribbon Sushi and the food store Gourmet Garage all had mercury above one part per million, the “action level” at which the F.D.A. can take food off the market. (The F.D.A. has rarely, if ever, taken any tuna off the market.) The highest mercury concentration, 1.4 parts per million, was found in tuna from Blue Ribbon Sushi. The lowest, 0.10, was bought at Fairway.

When told of the newspaper’s findings, Andy Arons, an owner of Gourmet Garage, said: “We’ll look for lower-level-mercury fish. Maybe we won’t sell tuna sushi for a while, until we get to the bottom of this.” Mr. Arons said his stores stocked yellowfin, albacore and bluefin tuna, depending on the available quality and the price.

At Blue Ribbon Sushi, Eric Bromberg, an owner, said he was aware that bluefin tuna had higher mercury concentrations. For that reason, Mr. Bromberg said, the restaurant typically told parents with small children not to let them eat “more than one or two pieces.”

Koji Oneda, a spokesman for Sushi Seki, said the restaurant would talk to its fish supplier about the issue. A manager at Sushi of Gari, Tomi Tomono, said it warned pregnant women and regular customers who “love to eat tuna” about mercury levels. Mr. Tomono also said the restaurant would put warning labels on the menu “very soon.”

Scientists who performed the analysis for The Times ran the tests several times to be sure there was no mistake in the levels of methylmercury, the form of mercury found in fish tied to health problems.

The work was done at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, in Piscataway, a partnership between Rutgers and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Six pieces of sushi from most of the restaurants and stores would contain more than 49 micrograms of mercury. That is the amount the Environmental Protection Agency deems acceptable for weekly consumption over a period of several months by an adult of average weight, which the agency defines as 154 pounds. People weighing less are advised to consume even less mercury. The weight of the fish in the tuna pieces sampled by The Times were 0.18 ounces to 1.26 ounces.

In general, tuna sushi from food stores was much lower in mercury. These findings reinforce results in other studies showing that more expensive tuna usually contains more mercury because it is more likely to come from a larger species, which accumulates mercury from the fish it eats. Mercury enters the environment as an industrial pollutant.

In the Times survey, 10 of the 13 restaurants said at least one of the two tuna samples bought was bluefin. (It is hard for anyone but experts to tell whether a piece of tuna sushi is bluefin by looking at it.)

By contrast, other species, like yellowfin and albacore, generally have much less mercury. Several of the stores in the Times sample said the tuna in their sushi was yellowfin.

“It is very likely bluefin will be included in next year’s testing,” Dr. Bolger of the F.D.A. said. “A couple of months ago F.D.A. became aware of bluefin tuna as a species Americans are eating.”

A number of studies have found high blood mercury levels in people eating a diet rich in seafood. According to a 2007 survey by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the average level of mercury in New Yorkers’ blood is three times higher than the national average. The report found especially high levels among Asian New Yorkers, especially foreign-born Chinese, and people with high incomes. The report noted that Asians tend to eat more seafood, and it speculated that wealthier people favored fish, like swordfish and bluefin tuna, that happen to have higher mercury levels.

The city has warned women who are pregnant or breast feeding and children not to eat fresh tuna, Chilean sea bass, swordfish, shark, grouper and other kinds of fish it describes as “too high in mercury.” (Cooking fish has no effect on the mercury level.)

Dr. Kate Mahaffey, a senior research scientist in the office of science coordination and policy at the E.P.A. who studies mercury in fish, said she was not surprised by reports of high concentrations.

“We have seen exposures occurring now in the United States that have produced blood mercury a lot higher than anything we would have expected to see,” Dr. Mahaffey said. “And this appears to be related to consumption of larger amounts of fish that are higher in mercury than we had anticipated.”

Many experts believe the government’s warnings on mercury in seafood do not go far enough.

“The current advice from the F.D.A. is insufficient,” said Dr. Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health and chairman of the department of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark. “In order to maintain reasonably low mercury exposure, you have to eat fish low in the food chain, the smaller fish, and they are not saying that.”

Some environmental groups have sounded the alarm. Environmental Defense, the advocacy group, says no one, no matter his or her age, should eat bluefin tuna. Dr. Gochfeld said: “I like to think of tuna sushi as an occasional treat. A steady diet is certainly problematic. There are a lot of other sushi choices.”