A judge has ruled that a suit can be brought against a 4-year old who mowed down an 87-year old lady with her bike.
As their mothers watched, the girl and another child were racing their bikes, equipped with training wheels, down a sidewalk when they struck an elderly woman walking in front of a building on East 52nd st in Manhattan. The woman suffered a hip fracture and died three weeks months after surgery later of unrelated causes. Her estate sued the children and their parents for negligence.
Previous courts have ruled that children under 4 are incapable of negligence and cannot be sued for it. The child in this case was 3 months under 5 and the judge decided not to extend the four and under rule to her.
In his ruling, the judge concluded by saying there was nothing to indicate the child’s “lack of intelligence or maturity” or evidence to “indicate that another child of similar age and capacity under the circumstances could not have reasonably appreciated the danger of riding a bicycle into an elderly woman.”
4-Year-Old Can Be Sued, Judge Rules in Bike Case [NYT] (Thanks to Howard!)
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Sorry I didn’t have time to RTFA but it sounds like maybe her insurance refused to pay her medical bills, based on her injuries being caused by someone else. Therefore, her estate was just trying to collect the money from the girl. A slightly similar thing happened to me; my doctor would not take my health insurance because my injury was caused by an accident that someone else (a grownup) caused.
Sounds more like if the estate should have gone after anyone, it’d be the parents. Can’t they be held responsible for their child’s behavior? They are *supposedly* the ones with the sense to keep a better eye on their kids. Parents of kids much older than 4 are getting jailed for their child’s truancies.
Quoting from TFA: “She died three months later of unrelated causes.”
Umm, so why the f@ck is some asshole suing a 4 year-old kid and/or her parents??
It’s not like kids that age are trying to re-enact Death Race 2000 or anything…
It’s a shame somebody died three months later after hip surgery, but shit happens. If the woman in question had fell getting out of the tub and bust her hip, would her kids go after the company who made the tub?
The lady’s insurance company would probably pay her medical bills in the scenario you describe. They would not pay in this instance since it was caused by someone else at fault. I don’t get the idea that the kid is being sued for the death. Legal action is being taken so that her estate can get the medical bills paid by whatever insurance that the kid’s parents have.
All right, I’ve officially seen it all.
I never see little kids ridding bikes on the sidewalks of Manhattan, parents usually take their kids to the parks for that. It’s not an outer borough, the foot traffic and car traffic are 10x of what it is in my end of Brooklyn. Since it’s the upper east side I’ll assume everyone involved has money.
The elderly woman died three MONTHS afterward, from causes unrelated to this incident. Please check your facts.
+1 for the judge.
Intentionally or not, the 4-year old inflicted serious injury on the victim.
If there is an age of majority for negligence, what’s next? If a retarded 18-year old had casued the accident, would there be a free pass based on the trainable’s IQ? If a pit bull escaped from the parent’s fenced yard and ate the woman, does the dog get a free pass since its reasoning ability isn’t up to the human level?
Really, this is a roundabout lawsuit against the 4 year old’s parent(s). Depending on the coverage in their homeowner’s policy, their insurance company may be the deep pockets the lawer is going after.
Hip fracture in an 87-year-old woman is an act of God. And suing a pit bull is also quite ridiculous.
If the woman trips due to her own inattention and/or an existing medical condition (such as Altzheimers, which happened with my stepmother), it is a no-fault situation.
If she is forced into falling by a vehicle (tricycle, bike, car or 18-wheeler) while walking on the sidewalk, the only way your theory works is if it could be proven God was riding the tricycle.
My only point of agreement is (if it is true there was no “cause effect” relationship between the accident and her death) the negligence claim and damages should be limited to the medical expenses and pain/suffering resulting from the accident itself.
One more note on “suing the pit bull”.
My point on the pit bull is such an incident is covered by the liability section of most homeowners’ insurance. This liability coverage also usually extends to acts of negligence caused by family members and/or domestic partners who live in the residence. Even if a 4 year old pit bull had been riding the tricycle, the insurance company is still on the hook for damages up to the policy’s liability limits.
I was a bit taken back with this as well. I showed it to a couple law school friends who said this kind of thing happens fairly often. They’d be suing the 4 year old in name only and it would fall upon the parents to pay up, basically.
The woman was 87 years old and died THREE months after the incident of UNRELATED causes. The article states “unrelated” indicating it wasn’t as though she was still weak and recovering from the initial hip fracture. She was 87. How long does one look back at someone to blame? Maybe she died of a heart attack and laughing at a sitcom was the cause. We (or rather the courts) would need to know her medical condition to determine if a three month old incident was a mitigating factor in the woman’s death.
The judge’s ruling doesn’t imply guilt (or innocence) on behalf of the child, merely that the child was over the child was over the 4 year rule.
We don’t know the judge’s thinking behind this. He might well have thought the suit was ridiculous, but that allowing it to either settle or go to trial was less of a burden on the courts (and the family fighting the lawsuit) than dealing with an appeal on the age decision.
so long to childhood. the judge should be sued for stupidity on the bench..
so long to childhood. the judge should be sued for stupidity on the bench..
Okay, my only problem with this is the part where it says the woman died three months later of unrelated causes. HELLO OUT THERE! If it is unrelated, that tells you that the cause of death was not related to the bicycle accident. Why is this four year old being sued? Should the parents have been supervising better? Absolutely! That is the issue with parents today. They don’t watch their offspring, they expect the rest of the world to do it. If it were my child, I would be telling them that they don’t ride their bikes on the sidewalk, and if they were, that they were to watch out for people, and if they see anyone coming towards them, they are to stop riding and wait until the person passes them to resume riding. However, I have common sense.
Parents are responsible for the acts of their children, if you’re not up to the responsibility this entails then don’t have children. This could have been prevented by appropriate supervision by the parents/caretaker. I would like someone to tell me why a FOUR year old is out riding bikes without supervision.
The judge did the right thing in this case.
I can tell you my four year old would NOT be racing bikes on a busy sidewalk because I’m a better parent than that- but if she was with anyone else that did let her do that I am confident she is not nearly developed enough to know what she was doing could kill someone.
She thinks any characters on tv that talk are real. She doesn’t believe me when I say the pizza man delivers pizza, as we always pick it up.
The kid is hardly capable of such forethought.
I don’t understand how the parents can even be held responsible for a death already determined to be unrelated to the bike crash.
In law school here. The reason for this is because, in negligence cases, you sue all parties. Otherwise, they blame each other. It’s simple. Open a casebook.
So far as I’m noticing, he’s not trying to “look smart”. He’s going for that “technically right” bit you mentioned.
I suppose nobody can take away your right to be wrong, but there are those of us who prefer that you have both sides of the argument before you make judgement.
I clearly remember being 4 (and 5, for that matter) and I can guarantee that running into someone with my trike didn’t really register anywhere on my morality meter. Sure you know it’s not right, but when that rock-solid baby logic shorts out for a second & you do have an accident, you expect the grown up people to be reasonable enough to understand that YOU’RE A CHILD & probably didn’t mean any harm.
There has to be more to this than the media is feeding us. It’s kinda like how the McDonald’s coffee case got to be held up as an example of an overly-litigious society, but in reality the woman’s legs got third degree burns from spilling coffee on her legs (that means she lost skin, and normally coffee will not hurt you that badly unless you buy it from someone trying to save a few pennies keeping coffee from getting stale).
Does this mean that someone who is 3 months short of 21 can drink?
Commenters hate kids!
C’mon, none of you raced bikes down the sidewalk as kids?
These lawsuits happen because insurance companies subrogate against one another or against individuals to recoup their losses when they payout for claims.
The woman’s life or health insurance company may have brought the suit to recover losses from payout. The family’s homeowner policy is probably paying.
Also, it doesn’t look like this is the ruling for the suit. It’s a ruling that the suit can be brought forward. Basically, this ruling is determining who the defendant is.