Car Attack

Writing a blog is challenging on many levels, especially when you are a full time Private Investigator.
I am assigned cases daily by attorneys who are obligated by ethical and moral and legal imperatives to protect their clients' privacy.
Those imperatives also extend to me... the investigator.
And now there's me...the blogger.

As an investigator, I have to be careful what I write here.
There are legal repercussions on so many levels when you say things in an open forum like Facebook, or on a blog.
When I am investigating a subject, one of the first places I go is Facebook or My Space. (Same thing with employers these days.) If someone has an internet presence, they can come under legal scrutiny at any time.

As a blogger, I have things to say I believe will help others.
The challenge, is to balance the two...
blogging and investigating...
protecting privacy and protecting free speech.
It always comes down to yin and yang. A balancing act.

The dilemma is how to say enough without crossing the line that reveals a client's identity, violates a client's privacy or threatens a client's case.
That's why my blogs have been a bit infrequent as of late.
I have been searching for a way to achieve that balance and have felt, for a while," stymied."

So today, I have a story to tell that combines many stories of a similar genre I have investigated through the years. Vehicular Assault.

It starts before I was a Private Investigator, when I was a more "public" investigator at the one of the Public Defender Offices in the Seattle area. That's where I worked on criminal cases for any number of the 90 Public Defenders/Attorneys in that office at that time. We represented the poor and indigent accused of crimes.

It was then I first represented people who allegedly and deliberately ran over others with their cars.
Between you and me, in all the two cases I worked there, they did it. On purpose.
The car attacks were deliberate acts of anger or revenge.
However, my job was to defend the wielder of the weapon.
To help the attorney explain why they did it.
Or prove why they didn't do it... even though we all knew they did do it.
All we needed was just enough of the "beyond reasonable doubt" factor.
My job as a criminal defense investigator, was to seek out evidence.
Or to to confirm the lack of it.
Then the years passed and I started working civil cases.

Simplified... civil cases are those in which you go after a financial judgment vs. prison time.
Civil cases are often concurrent to criminal ones. So when a drunk driver hits and hurts someone, the civil investigator is working for the attorney who is handling the injured person's insurance claim.

With a personal injury attorney... clear liability ... the right auto insurance policy and provisions in place... it's possible for an injured person to get some lost wages and medical bills paid before a case settles.
That's why more and more criminal actions are followed by civil actions, just as the O.J. Simpson murder case was.

So in the civil arena, I have also worked cases of people run over by cars.
I have been thinking a lot about those cases and the people caught under those cars lately.
Especially the ones where the driver intended to hit the victim, the ones where it was no accident.
One strikes a sharp memory chord.
It was 7 years ago in the next big city south of Seattle.

On a too-hot-to-sleep hot summer night, Deena (a pseudonym) was standing outside in her apartment complex parking area with her baby in her arms, chatting with neighbors. Suddenly, a fight ensued. A very drunk angry woman was fighting with a man. It was a poor area, it was a long while ago, before everyone had cell phones.
No one called 911 as the fight escalated.
The angry woman struck the man with her larghe bag, ran into her car. Backed it up. And aimed it directly at Denna, who was holding her baby.

To Deena's horrified eyes, the angry lady in the car was a bullet aimed at her and her baby.
Deena's primal instincts kicked in.
She threw the baby to another horrified woman who was standing by.
The baby left Deena's arms and landed safely just as the car landed hard against Deena's body. She fell and flew under the car and the car tire ran over Deena's body as it backed up.
Deena said it all played out in her head like it was a movie, like it wasn't happening to her.
She was conscious the whole time.
Everyone was screaming at the driver of ther car to stop.
The angry woman gave the crowd the finger and instead of stopping the car, she drove forward and ran over Deena's body again.

By that time, several people were at the car and the car door, pulling at it and yelling for her stop.

Instead, the driver backed over Deena's body a third time, which Deena has pulled into as close to a fetal position as she could. The driver fled the scene, driving backwards first... until she whipped into in a neighbor's driveway, and hightailed it down the road.

While Deena tried to move and breathe with one deflated lung and several broken ribs and limbs, the angry lady who assaulted her took a curve too fast and went off the road and headfirst into a tree. She wasn't wearing her seat belt, the car didn't have airbags and she died on the scene. Suffice to say the scene and autopsy photos were not pretty. She died from the initial impact to her head.

And because the car that hit Deena had no insurance on it...
and because Deena had no auto insurance or health insurance of her own...
there was nothing any civil attorney could do.
Perhaps the attorneys could go after the apartment owners because it happened on their property, but the attorneys who hired me on the case, chose not to do so.
There was no guarantee they could win.
And even if they did, it was doubtful they could collect a judgment.
The apartments were lower than low income.
The owners of the apartment could always declare bankruptcy and everyone in the apartments would be homeless. That is a burden the attorney who hired me chose not to bear.

Instead, Deena became one more charity case at a charitable and compassionate hospital. I handed Deena's case file to the attorney who handed her the bad news.
Sorry.
No can do.
This was done to you and there's nothing that can be done to the person beyond the vehicular assault charges the prosecutor filed.

Anyway you look at them, cars are weapons.
Even used legitimately and even without ill intent, they mow down pedestrians in crosswalks daily.
When used as a weapons against a mere mortal, the car always wins.
And in Deena's case, the only justice was poetic...
the car that nearly killed her, was also the Defendant's judge, jury and executioner.