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Wrongful death suit in Quebec train crash filed in US

(Reuters) – The guardian of a girl whose Canadian father died in the tragic Quebec train crash this month filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Illinois on Monday against a number of railway and fuel services companies connected with the disaster.

The lawsuit is believed to be the first filed in the United States related to the train derailment in the early hours of July 6 that sent 72 tankers of crude oil crashing into the village of Lac-Megantic in Quebec, where they exploded in a ball of fire, killing almost 50 people.

Annick Roy, the guardian of Fanny Roy Veilleux, whose father Jean-Guy Veilleux, a Lac-Megantic resident, allegedly burned to death as a result of the train crash, filed the lawsuit in Cook County. Court documents did not provide the age of Fanny Roy Veilleux, but described her as a minor daughter.

The defendants include railroad operator Montreal Maine and Atlantic Railway Inc, its parent company Rail World Inc, MMA Chairman Edward Burkhardt, and fuel services company World Fuel Services Corp.

Roy alleges in the suit that the companies largely failed to keep the train’s oil tankers, known as DOT-111s, up to reasonable government safety standards and are therefore negligent in the death of Veilleux.

“For more than 20 years, problems with DOT-111 tankers rupturing upon derailment have been well documented by government safety regulators and media outlets,” Roy said in the lawsuit. “The railroad and petroleum industries have long acknowledged the design flaws in the DOT-111, but have consistently ignored the (National Transportation Safety Board’s) calls to address the dangers associated with rupture of the tankers.”

Roy said in the lawsuit that the tanker cars that spilled in Lac-Megantic were the same type that ruptured in a 2009 [...]

By |July 24th, 2013|News|Comments Off on Wrongful death suit in Quebec train crash filed in US|

Wrongful death suit over wrong-way Santa Cruz crash – San Jose Mercury News

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Dan Coyro/Sentinel Eric Weers faces murder charges for intentionally killing Ana Barajas with his car.

SANTA CRUZ — The surviving children of Ana Barajas, the 48-year-old medical technician killed last year in a wrong-way crash on Highway 17, have filed a wrongful death suit over their mother’s death.
Filed in July, the suit names driver Eric Rsel Weers, his father, and the Santa Cruz Community Counseling Center where Weers was a resident at the time of the July 11, 2011 accident. It also claims Weers, who was under treatment for schizoaffective disorder, was using illegal drugs and impaired at the time Barajas was killed.
Weers faces murder charges over the crash, with prosecutors alleging he deliberately drove the wrong way onto the highway. He has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Weers was in court Friday, a hearing attended by members of the Barajas family. A prosecutor said a long-delayed court-ordered psychiatric report by Dr. James Missett has been completed but it has not yet been sent to the attorneys.
Judge Paul Burdick ordered the report be delivered by Friday.
Weers has a history of mental illness and was living in subsidized housing for psychiatric patients in Santa Cruz at the time of the crash. His attorneys previously said Weers was prescribed five psychiatric medications in 2010 but hadn’t taken them for several days before the crash.
Calling the Community Counseling Center’s actions negligent, the suit claims staff there failed to exercise ordinary standards of care. The suit further says staff

knew, or should have known, that Weers was a reckless driver who disobeyed traffic laws, and that he was likely to injure someone while driving.
The suit also names Weers’ father, [...]

By |October 20th, 2012|News|Comments Off on Wrongful death suit over wrong-way Santa Cruz crash – San Jose Mercury News|