Marietta Personal Injury Law Blog

When one hears of a police officer at the scene of a car accident, one generally thinks of a first responder to the crash. Perhaps the last thing on someone's mind is that an officer of the law could be capable of causing an accident and then fleeing in an attempt to hide from the crash scene. However, for one now-former Georgia police officer, this appears to be what happened when he became involved in a car accident.

On April 21, a 77-year-old woman was driving down a road in Perry when an off-duty police officer's Dodge pickup rear-ended her Oldsmobile. He then was said to have driven his truck over a median and parked in a nearby field, thereafter fleeing on foot. While the precise cause of the crash is as yet uncertain, the a passenger in the former cop's truck claims that the man had been drinking beforehand and was afraid to face any potential consequences. Due to the collision, the 77-year-old woman in the Oldsmobile sustained neck and back injuries.

I wanted to share colleague and fellow safety advocate, Sean Kane's recently published article in Bloomberg BNA regarding information that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration may be hiding from consumers.

"Secrecy is the sine qua non of most investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and is compromising the agency's mission," says Kane.

Click on the link below to read the full article.

What Doesn't NHTSA Want You to Know About Auto Safety?

As many as six California teenagers were hospitalized with alcohol poisoning last month, and two last weekend alone, from drinking hand sanitizer.

Hand sanitizer seems to be the latest trend used by teens to induce intoxication, and it has public health officials worried, as a few squirts of hand sanitizer could equal a couple of shots of hard liquor. Liquid hand sanitizer is 62 to 65 percent ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, the main ingredient in beer, wine and spirits, making it 120-proof. To compare, a bottle of vodka is 80-proof.

Teenagers use salt to break up the alcohol from the sanitizer to get a more powerful dose. These distillation instructions can be found on the Internet in tutorial videos that describe in detail how to do it. Other troubling videos have surfaced online showing kids laughing as they purposely ingested sanitizer, many boasting of fulfilling a dare.

"This is a rapidly emerging trend," Dr. Cyrus Rangan, medical toxicology consultant for Children's Hospital Los Angeles, said in a news conference today. About 2,600 cases have been reported in California since 2010, but it's become a national problem. "It's not just localized to us," Helen Arbogast, an injury prevention coordinator in the trauma program at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, told ABC News today. "Since 2009 we can see on YouTube it's in all regions of the country. We see it in the South, in the Midwest, in the East."

Dr. Sean Nordt, director of toxicology at the USC Los Angeles County Emergency Department, told ABC News it used to get reports of children accidentally consuming small amounts of hand sanitizer, but now the trend is toward purposeful ingestion by those who cannot purchase or obtain alcohol legally.

"We get worried about children getting into these, but it is different from an adolescent who is trying to drink half a bottle to get drunk," said Nordt.

Rangan cautioned parents to treat hand sanitizers "like we treat any medication in the home as far as safety is concerned. Keep it out of reach, out of sight, out of mind when not in use."

It is not always clear exactly what happened in the aftermath of a Georgia motor vehicle accident. That is particularly true when one of the parties to a two-car accident is killed at the scene of the crash. Police are often left with piecing together what occurred based upon the statements of the other party, along with a review of the physical evidence. At times, they may feel stymied as they try and sort through the evidence to determine the exact cause of a fatal accident. And when that occurs, they often ask the public for help, which is the case involving one recent tragedy in Gwinnett County.

The car accident happened on April 10 at about 12:40 p.m. A 22-year-old Sugar Hill man was apparently stopped southbound in his vehicle, preparing to turn left. At that time a Jeep being driven by a 28-year-old man from Loganville approached the intersection. Police believe that as the traffic light was turning from green to yellow, the first driver turned left in front of the second driver, resulting in a crash. The 22-year-old man died as a result of the crash.