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“On the morning of December 7, 2007 the lives of my mother mine and my two sisters changed forever. All it took was one dreadful phone call with a voice on the other side telling my mother who picked up the call that my father was being taken by ambulance to Kings County Hospital, a place that became extremely familiar to us for months to come, but a place that before that morning we had never heard of.
My strong, gentle, humble and secure father who was the person that we went to for advice and loved us unconditionally, a person who was an operating engineer since he was able to drive and who was one of the first people that helped with the clean up of Ground Zero who was the best person companies would call to operate heavy equipment, was in a construction accident. Not by his own fault, but by the carelessness of another, he suffered a TBI (traumatic brain injury), with all the uncertainties that a scary word like TBI brings. My mother and our family were told that he needed surgery (a twelve hour brain surgery) to close the wound however that was going to be the easy part. Of course risks are always there when in surgery but we had the greatest trauma surgeons and our faith in God, yes it’s amazing how faith can bring some peace in times like these.
So here comes the moment we were waiting for, the moment that we realized that life as we knew it was changed forever. He was in a medical induced coma for about a week, and when he finally was taken out of it, that moment when he opened his eyes for the first time, and we thought that like in the movies he was going to ask us what happened, only that in real life he didn’t remember how to speak…….Not his native Italian language, not English, just a bunch of words that made no sense to us….He has aphasia…the person knows what he wants to say but the brain cannot get the correct word out….. My father was lost….His body battered and stitched up…. His personality was gone.
Now we needed to take care of him. He can no longer work, the uncertainty is scary, we want some sort of justice, this happened because of the carelessness of another person, we wanted to know that things can still be ok, medical bills, mortgage, my sister’s college tuition, what was going to happen?
My mother needed to be the strong one now….She asked for help in finding a lawyer….So we found one….Only that after three years of putting his case together he gave us no hope of ever being able to bring some justice, my father by now was a little better after three years of rehab, medications and additional surgeries. We felt that this lawyer wasn’t doing enough, that it almost seemed as if he was pulling for the other side, his case was given to every lawyer in that firm….Never handled by the person we hired to help him. Hope was slowly fading….
By now my father needed a strong lawyer with a team of people that are as strong as he is, someone who believed in my father and who will fight for him as if it was his own father, so my father asked me to please help him in finding a strong lawyer… someone who specialized in hard cases like his. We started researching lawyers in TBI cases…. one person always popped up…STUART FINZ, of Finz & Finz, P.C.
And did Mr. Finz fight…….
When my father called initially and said to Mr. Finz I cannot drive, Mr. Finz drove to his house and sat at his kitchen table and explained with the help of an interpreter that he was going to help him, fight for him, and bring some closure to him.
Mr. Finz arranged for additional depositions, more investigations, as my father’s memory came back from that dreadful day, and he used to tell his other lawyer what happened but they never added to his depositions, Mr. Finz made sure my father’s voice was heard……when the other side called for additional depositions Mr. Finz fought with tooth and nail to have justice, depositions that would last hours on end….to fix what an incapable lawyer did.
About a year after Mr. Finz and his trusted team of lawyers took the case….they were able to take the case to mediation….and it ended in my fathers favor….
We are told that every person that we meet here is not by chance, they are meant to be part of your life…. for a minute, for a month or for a lifetime. And the impact that they bring will change the course of your life forever, I think my dad would have preferred to never have met any lawyers in his lifetime, however when an accident occurs and you need a VOICE, A FIGHTER , A FRIEND, he is glad that Mr. Stuart Finz was that person, that lawyer, that VOICE, that friend.
So thank you Mr. Finz, thank you Todd, thank you Yvette, and all the staff who in their small or big way helped bring justice and closure to my father.”
