New York City Personal Injury Blog

A fiery car crash took the life of one person and left a man critically injured in New York on March 11. The accident occurred in East Flatbush just after 3:30 a.m.

According to the New York Police Department, the driver of the car, a 26-year-old man, was traveling on Kings Highway when he apparently lost control of his vehicle and violently smashed into a street pole near Tilden Avenue. The force of the impact destroyed the vehicle and caused it to burst into flames. A passerby managed to put out the fire, and rescue crews extricated the driver and a 30-year-old passenger. They were transported to Kings County Hospital for emergency treatment.

New York motorists who cause fatal collisions might be more likely than the other driver to be under the influence of opioids at the time of the crash. A study examined data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System on 18,321 deadly two-car motor vehicle accidents and found drivers who caused accidents were almost two times more likely to have opioids in their system than drivers who did not. Among all fatal accidents in the study, more than 7,500 were the result of failure to remain in the lane.

The study was published in February in JAMA Network Open. Hydrocodone was the drug most commonly found in people's system followed by morphine, oxycodone, and methadone.

New York residents who work in zoos know that certain animals can be dangerous. In December of 2018, an intern at a North Carolina zoo was killed by a lion that somehow left its enclosure. In mid-January 2019, another incident, though non-life-threatening, occurred; a volunteer at the Toledo Zoo had her hand bitten and her thumb detached by a 14-year-old orangutan.

The volunteer was with two paid staff members while she was in the area where orangutans are fed. This area is closed to visitors, so the public was in no way endangered. During the feeding, the orangutan reached out through the mesh enclosure at the volunteer. The incident was over in a matter of seconds, but the volunteer still needed to be taken to the hospital for treatment.

The brain is a very complicated organ that performs many functions. It controls life sustaining activities like breathing, while also managing physical movements, language skills, creativity, problem-solving abilities and more. Because we require our brains to complete such a wide variety of functions, it can be life-altering when a brain is injured. However, not all traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) are the same.

Different kinds of force and amounts of force can cause different kinds of injuries to a brain. This can result a wide variety of symptoms which can be expressed. Symptoms can also vary based on the part of the brain that received an injury. With so many variables at play, it is safe to assume every person’s experience of a TBI is unique. However, TBIs are generally categorized by type and severity.