A wrongful death lawsuit against a young woman in Virginia is highlighting just how fast a wrongful death can occur, and asks the question of whether someone is responsible for causing a death of negligence that might have been unavoidable anyway.
In this case, the woman being sued, Kaylie Renee Silby, is a 20 year old who was driving down the street when her cell phone rang. She looked over to pick it up, felt herself hit something, and when she stopped noticed it was a young child. Omarion Rose, who was 2 years old, was taken to the hospital with blunt force trauma to the head, which she didn’t survive.
Silby, along with two insurance companies, is being sued for $1.35 million. The original lawsuit was filed in September 2008, but was amended a year later. It alleges she was negligent and distracted when she hit the poor little girl. Silby was fined $500 by law enforcement for improper driving; that’s it.
There are a couple of big issues in a case like this. The first is what was a 2-year old doing in the street in the first place? Young children do these types of things, and parents sometimes have a hard time controlling them. There’s no way to know how fast Silby was going, and it’s possible that even had she not had the cell phone call that she might have hit the child, who obviously wasn’t in the road at the time the phone rang, otherwise Silby would have seen here. So, who was really negligent at the time the accident occurred?
The second is whether looking in another direction because of a distraction is enough to warrant negligence. These days a lot of attention is being given to cell phones, but it could have been any type of distraction. An adult walking in the middle of the street could be hit by someone if they’ve been distracted, especially if that adult was crossing the street at a point where they shouldn’t have been crossing. In this case, Silby wasn’t at the end of the street, where she would have had to stop, and if she had been hit by another vehicle because someone pulling out of a driveway had hit her, or even if she’d hit them, she wouldn’t be responsible for anything. Even though a 2-year old child wouldn’t know the difference in looking both ways before going out into the street, is the driver at fault because the child didn’t know better?
Meanwhile, the lawyer for Silby is requesting a change of venue, saying that all the publicity and press against his client has tainted the pool of jury members in such an emotionally charged case. There is no hearing scheduled in the case. However, precedence doesn’t fall in Silby’s favor. It should be interesting to see how this case goes as it proceeds.
