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$1.8 Million Dollar Settlement Reached – Young Female Passenger Sustained Serious Injuries in a Car Crash

Plaintiff’s attorney, Eliot M. Schuman of DelBello Donnellan Weingarten Wise & Wiederkehr, LLP negotiated a $1.8 Million Dollar Settlement on the day a jury was to be selected in Rockland County (3/1/2018). On June 13, 2015 a legally intoxicated motorist drove his vehicle at an unlawfully excessive rate of speed into oncoming traffic and crashed it head on into a vehicle in which the then twenty-three year old Plaintiff sat as a front seat restrained passenger. In addition to several fractured ribs, a fractured finger and a forehead laceration which required grafting and multiple sutures to close, the Plaintiff also sustained a three column injury to her back involving vertebral fractures through the posterior, middle and anterior columns at levels L2, L1 and T12. The young woman’s spine was rendered so unstable that it could no longer support her weight, which required her to undergo an immediate laminectomy and fusion at four vertebral levels from T11 to L2. She was hospitalized for two weeks including as an in-patient at a rehabilitation facility, is permanently predisposed to arthritis at the surgical site, and suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Trauma Induced Depression.