Jury Awards Family for Time Lost Will Terminally Ill Son Due to Car Crash
CHARLESTON COUNTY, SC- Greenvilleonline.com writes that a jury awarded a family well over $100,000 after a car crash caused them to lose time with their terminally ill toddler. The child was suffering from a rare form of leukemia, which led his parents to take him to a medical facility on the coast. While staying in the area for treatment, a man from Isle of Palms ran through a stop sign and collided with the family’s car.*
The aftermath of the collision led to the family having to sort through the stressful insurance complications and paperwork that follows a collision. The court stated that lost time is a compensable item for the purposes of lawsuit damages. When the driver struck the family’s vehicle, they suffered the loss of valuable minutes away from their time with their son. The court set the rate at 37 cents per minute of time that the family lost as a result of the hassle of the insurance claim.
No one in the family sustained physical injuries in the collision, and so the only consideration was a calculation of the time spent handling the claim and the rate at which they would be compensated for that time.The court found that the family had spent 264 days handling complications with the collision. The crash took place in 2015, less than one year after the boy received his diagnosis. The toddler passed away just a few months after the wreck. The family stated that the jury was brave to award value to lost time, and that verdict would help them with closure.
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Sources:https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/south-carolina/2020/02/04/value-time-37-cents-minute-family-2-year-old-who-died/4618644002/