$2,250,000 Settlement

Tragedy struck a young family when their five-year-old son was waiting to cross the street for his school bus. While he was waiting, a different large yellow school bus that looked just like our client’s bus was heading up the block. This bus, however, was not our client’s bus. The bus stopped across the street, directly in front of our client, to pick up another student. As the bus driver was watching the other student board the bus, our client, believing this was his bus, began to cross the street to get on board. The bus driver failed to look to his left, where our client was crossing, before closing the boarding door and retracting the stop signs affixed to the bus. By this time, our client had nearly finished crossing the street and was in front of the bus when it started to move forward. As the bus moved forward, it struck and tragically killed our client.

Unfortunately, New York law does not properly recognize the value of the loss of a young child’s life because damages are measured by pain and suffering and economic loss. Here, our client died within moments of impact and therefore did not sustain a long period of pain and suffering. In addition, since he was only five years old, he was not working or supporting anyone financially, and therefore there was no claim for economic loss.

Nonetheless, our firm pressed that a new bill called the Grieving Families Act had been passed by the New York State Senate and New York State Assembly. This new bill would provide our client’s family with a right to pursue compensation for emotional suffering caused by the loss of their loved one. However, the bill has not been signed by Governor Hochul and therefore is not law of New York. Signing this new law would remedy a significant and protracted injustice in the measurement of damages in New York State, however, enormous pressure has been placed on the Governor by lobbyists for the insurance industry to not sign this bill into law.

In this case, we alleged that if the new bill became law, our client’s family would be entitled to a significant recovery, but if the bill did not become law, our client’s family would be entitled to significantly less. By leveraging the possibility that the Grieving Families Act would become law, we were able to secure a significant settlement for our client’s family. We are hopeful that the Governor does what is right for the citizens of New York State and signs the Grieving Families Act, so that families will be able to recover for their emotional trauma after the loss of a loved one due to negligence.