Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf is a New York Plaintiff's personal injury law firm specializing in automobile accidents, construction accidents, medical malpractice, products liability, police misconduct and all types of New York personal injury litigation.
Published on:

location of the fatal moped accidentA man riding a moped was fatally struck by a reckless driver in the Bronx, NYC.

Early Sunday, around 12:30 am, 57 year old Frank Davila was riding a moped South on Rosedale Avenue when he was struck by 33 year old Stephanie Mendez who was driving a 2005 Grey Volvo Sedan.  At the time of the accident Mendez was driving with a suspended license.  The police checked her blood alcohol which registered 0.074 which is below the legally drunk level. Despite a blood test below the legal level, the police charged her with driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs and driving with a suspended license. The investigation is not over yet though but so far Mendez has not been charged with criminally negligent homicide or vehicular manslaughter.

Paramedics found Davila unresponsive and unconscious on the sidewalk. They rushed him to the hospital but it was too late and the 59 year old father was pronounced dead.

Published on:

e-scooter-4496668_640While e-scooters can be a very convenient way to commute in big cities, e-scooter accidents can result in very bad injuries including head trauma. In New York, it is now legal to ride a E-scooters but by-the minute rental which are already popular in many cities around the world are still not available in the Big Apple. However things are about to change and the city has been recently receiving offers from rental companies to  start providing services to New Yorkers next March.

NO RENTAL IN MANHATTAN

Manhattan will still be off-limits for e-scooter rental companies. The city will favor areas that are not well served by other transportation options. While the idea to favor areas with less transportation options might sounds like a good idea, it would be interesting to know how the city is planning to protect e-scooter users in these areas.  As a reminder, Citi Bike started to implement their program in the Bronx recently while the DOT has been too slow at installing protected bike lanes in the borough.  The result is an increase of 40% of bicycle accident injuries in the Bronx since the beginning of the year.

Published on:

One pedestrian died and two were seriously injured in New York City last week. In all cases, drivers were recklessly driving and in two cases drivers took off after the accident leaving their victims lying on the street.

The first accident occurred on Tuesday in the Bronx. 72 year old Sidney Sale was walking back home after stopping at his local Bodega. As he was crossing the intersection of East 211th  Street and Paulding Avenue in Williamsbridge in the Bronx he was struck by a car. The pedestrian who was in the crosswalk, fell on the ground. The reckless driver did not stop and fled on East 211th Street.  Immediately after, another driver making a left turn onto East 211th Street from Pauling hit the victim for the second time and dragged him along the street. The second driver stayed at the scene of the accident. Sydney Sale suffered trauma all over his body and was rushed to the hospital where he later died from his injuries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM0azfwcrtk

Published on:

location of the deadly crash between a cyclist and a tractor trailer truckA 34 year old man died in a bicycle accident in the Bronx, NYC, yesterday. The cyclist collided with a tractor-trailer truck on Bruckner Boulevard around 1:45 pm.  It is still not clear how the accident occurred. An initial police report indicates that the cyclist was riding westbound on Bruckner Boulevard and that the Tractor Trailer Truck driver was heading South on Brown Place. No information was provided about who had the light. The report just concludes that the cyclist ran into the back of the truck. The area is often congested as road users use this part of the Bruckner Boulevard to access the Willis Avenue Bridge.

Why would a cyclist run into the back of a truck?

This seems  to be a very strange conclusion and hopefully further investigation will reveal what exactly led to the death of this cyclist. Unfortunately the NYPD has a long history of blaming cyclists for crashes and giving slack to faulty drivers. Last year, Mario Venezuela, a Queens teenager, was fatally hit by a negligent truck driver. The police blamed the teenager for his own death however surveillance footage of the crash shows that the truck driver was reckless and cause the death of the teenager. A video of the crash shows the truck driver veering to his left before cutting hard into a right turn without using his turn signal and crashing into Venezuela.

Published on:

New York Personal Injury Attorneys Rubinowitz and TorganIn their recent Trial Advocacy column in the New York Law Journal, NYC Personal Injury Attorneys Ben Rubinowitz of Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf, and Evan Torgan of Torgan & Cooper write: Whether in the form of a deposition, surveillance footage or an event captured on a nearby security camera, the trial lawyer must think carefully how to best exploit a video as a strategic tool for helping her win the case before ever questioning a witness. If used properly, a video can serve to leave an indelible impression that there is no doubt that the witness is a liar, cannot be trusted and is anything but credible.

Published on:

Best Law Firms - Standard BadgeFor the 11th consecutive year, our New York Personal Injury Law Firm was named a Best Law Firm 2021 by U.S. News – Best Lawyers®. The firm was also named

Published on:

location of the e-bike colision with SUVA driver fatally struck an e-bike rider in New York and then fled the scene of the accident. 42 year old Ernesto Guzman of East Harlem was delivering a pizza on his e-bike yesterday around 4:30 pm when a black Chevrolet Tahoe SUV with TLC plates crashed into him. The driver then left, leaving the man dying on the street. The accident occurred in East Harlem at the intersection of E. 97th Street and Second Avenue. The Police found the vehicle abandoned by the driver on E. 96th Street. They are still looking for the runaway driver. The victim had delivery bags with him and a witness at a nearby Deli told the NY Daily News that they flew 3 feet away during the collision.  The witness also mentioned that the victim was badly injured with a lot of blood coming out of his head.

When EMS and the police arrived, they transported the victim to a hospital emergency room which was just yards away from the scene of the accident but it was too late. Ernesto Guzman was so badly injured that he passed away.

The police are still investigating the accident. According to preliminary investigation, the e-bike rider was driving south on Second Ave when he was hit by the SUV driving  West on 97th Street.

Published on:

Brookklyn bridge bike lane and pedestrian lane are too narrowDelays in the Hudson Tunnel Project are putting thousands of  travelers at risk of dying in a major infrastructure disaster every day. The Hudson Tunnel which was seriously damaged during Super Storm Sandy after salty water flooded the tunnel has since been suffering from rapid deterioration.  The project to built another tunnel under the Hudson River and to rehabilitate the old one has been postponed mainly because the Trump administration refuses to make good on the previous decision by the Obama administration to pay for half of the project which is estimated at $11.6 billion. Every day an average 450 Amtrak trains carry an estimated 200,000 passengers through the tunnel which is kept operational by ongoing emergency maintenance. Amtrak says the tunnel is safe however the salty water that entered the tunnel during super storm Sandy left behind corrosive chlorides which are attacking the concrete tunnel liner and bench walls where the electrical and train signaling systems are located.

According to a recent article in Construction Dive, the delay in the Hudson Tunnel Project is on the top of the list of the five biggest infrastructure disasters waiting to happen in the US. The second one is the portion of U.S. Highway 1 that runs on the East Coast of Florida. The Highway is on the top of the list of America’s most deadliest roads with more than 1000 people dying in crashes yearly. The Mojave River Dam in San Bernardino is  number 3 on the list. The dam has a high risk to fail according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers which assess the risk of failure of American dams. A failure of the Mojave River Dam threatens 300,000 people living in communities located as far as 140 miles away from the dam. The Brooklyn Bridge is number 4 on the list of the largest infrastructure dangers in the US.  The Brooklyn Bridge is listed among 46,000 other bridges in the US which are structurally deficient. However, the bridge might soon be removed from the list as it is undergoing a $238 million rehabilitation. Last on the list of the top 5 infrastructure disasters waiting to happen is the lead contamination of the water in Chicago. The use of lead pipes as service lines was banned by federal laws in 1986 but Chicago still relies on 400,000 lead service lines to bring the water into 80% of the city’s homes. As a result two thirds of Chicago homes have lead in their tap water and one third of them have a lead level which is above the level autorized in bottled water.

 

Published on:

construction NYCThankfully nobody was injured after a loose cable on a spinning crane hit a building under construction sending giant metal debris down the streets in Midtown Manhattan yesterday night around 7 PM and creating chaos.

The metal pieces fell from the 84th floor of  a high rise under construction at 111 West 57th Street. The spinning crane at the top of the building first  caused concerns that it could be loose or unstable but later on firefighters noticed that a cable hanging from the spinning boom was constantly hitting the building, destroying it and sending pieces of metal down the street near the intersection of 6th Avenue and 56th Street.

A crane crew was then sent up and the crane operator was able to get into the crane and secure the loose cable. The DOT issued a full stop work order for failure to safeguard public and property construction operations.

Published on:

Construction Accident Injuries in New York City in May 2020To reduce construction accident injuries and deaths in New York City, Local Law 196 was signed in 2017. The law requires that hard hats working on most New York City construction sites obtain a SST card in a specific deadline. To obtain this card, construction workers must complete at least 40 hours of OSHA or DOB approved safety training while their supervisors are required to complete at least 62 hours of safety training. Because of the Covid-19 situation, the deadline to obtain the SSD card was extended to March 2021.

The NYC Department of Buildings announced that as of today 100,000 nyc construction workers completed their training and obtained their SSD card

The DOT believes that the safety training led to a reduction of more than 20% of work site injuries in New York City last year.  The DOB also announced that construction companies with more than 15 employees can now file an application to receive a one-time grant to help reduce the cost related to training.