Transcript
911 Dispatch: 911, what is your emergency?
Caller: Yeah, I just saw a car run into the back of a semi out here on Route I-70.
911 Dispatch: Anybody hurt? Do we know?
Caller: I would say the person driving the car ain’t doing so well. The whole driver’s side window is pushed clear back to the back seat.
Nikka Alcorn: In November, it was actually November 11th of 2020, Veterans Day, my husband was on his way to come get me. I thought, “Why is he not here?” I kept looking out the window, waiting for him to pull up at any time. At that point, that’s when I got a call from my daughter. The way she reacted, I knew something had happened.
David Craig: The first time I ever met Nikka Alcorn was November 12th, 2020. The day before her husband was killed on a wreck on I-70. Fortunately for her and James’ two daughters, someone from Nikka’s church had recommended that they contact my office and call me. And because they did hire us quickly, that very next morning I was in the office and we were putting a team together to protect her and her family.
James’ case was an extraordinarily tough case. Unbeknownst to him, there was a truck stopped in the same left lane, the passing lane. Now, the reason the semi was stopped on I-70 was because it had dropped a couple of pipes off of the trailer and somebody had seen the pipes fallen off. Semi driver didn’t know it and stopped him right in the highway. And we hired an accident reconstructionist, an accident reconstructionist went out and scanned the scene, and they came to the conclusion that the speed that Mr. Alcorn was going would have been very difficult for him to stop or switch lanes. Unfortunately, the semi-driver sat there and didn’t move his semi before Mr. Alcorn struck the back of it.
Well, because we were hired the day after the wreck, we were able to send preservation letters out to say, “Please do not adjust or unload that trailer.” For a shipper to be responsible, you have to be able to prove that they did something wrong when they loaded it, and what they did wrong was hidden. That the driver couldn’t have seen it. So when we found the trailer, it was sitting in a junkyard and on it was still all the pipes except for the couple that had fallen off before the wreck. And then we watched them unload that trailer, and unbeknownst to the driver of the semi, this shipper, when they had loaded this pipe, they had used boards on the bottom to brace the pipes and those boards were not fastened down.
When the truck was on the highway, those little boards moved. And when those boards moved, the load shifted. When the load shifted, the strapping on the load became loose and that’s what caused the pipes to fall. And that was a latent or hidden defect, because once the pipes were put onto the trailer, you couldn’t tell that those boards were not fastened down. Again, if the trailer had been unloaded, it would have destroyed. There would have been no evidence as to why the pipes fell off that trailer. We would have had no case against the shipper, and the only case we would have had was against the trucking company with their minimum insurance and that would have been inadequate compensation for this family. Because she had hired a firm like ours that knows how to do trucking, we were able to make that discovery and go after the shipper in this particular case.
Nikka Alcorn: Don’t pick an attorney that is just out for themselves. They need to pick someone like David Craig in his office who is knowledgeable of the law, has expertise, and has compassion for people. There were days that I didn’t know if mentally I was going to make it, but they helped me walk through the hardest time of my life and I’m just very grateful for that.