In 2008, an 18-year-old young man named Hiroyuki Joho was hurrying to catch an inbound Metra train at the Edgebrook (Illinois) Metra station. It was pouring rain, and Joho was carrying an umbrella. A second Amtrak train was passing through at speeds exceeding 70 mph.
Apparently Joho was a bit too close to the tracks. The incoming train struck him and (gory alert) a large person of Joho’s body was tossed 100 feet and struck Gayane Zokhrabov. She was knocked to the ground, sustaining a shoulder injury and a fractured leg.
Zokhrabov sued the dead man’s estate. A judge in Cook County turned down the appeal on the grounds that Joho could not have anticipated Zokhrabov’s injuries. She appealed, and the state appeals court agreed, ruling that Joho could have reasonably anticipated that he would be killed and his body would then be tossed into the crowd of people on the platform. Zokhrabov’s lawyer said that Joho’s death and Zokhrabov’s injury occurred due to negligence on the part of Joho.
Joho’s mother sued the railroad, saying that they’d been negligent by not announcing that Joho’s train would be delayed… which led to her son’s fatal accident when he hurried to catch the (wrong) inbound train.
The railroad countered by saying that they do not have a duty to warn folks that a moving train represents an “open and obvious danger”.
I guess the only person left to sue is Zokhrabov… on the grounds that she should have known that standing on a train platform might place her at risk for being struck by flying body parts. Or perhaps the engineer of the train that was late as he should have been aware that he might cause a chain of events that led to one man’s death and a woman’s fractured leg. Or the state of Illinois for allowing trains to operate within its borders.
At any rate, don’t get struck by a train. Your estate could be sued.
Read this Chicago Tribune article or this MSNBC article for more information.
"The first thing we do, we kill all the lawyers."
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