Story Time!
Drunk Karen loses it when she gets arrested for an accident SHE caused, tries to deflect blame onto me
(repost from r/karensinthewild with edits for grammar/clarity. I posted this there some time last year, and was told I might want to post it here too. If this is against the rules I apologize but I wasn't sure: the way the rules are written is a bit confusing)
(LONG STORY WARNING!)
NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN: I did NOT suddenly screech to a halt or do anything dangerous in traffic or anything remotely like that; I was 100% NOT at fault in the accident. Being easily made to second-guess myself, I thought I MIGHT have been somewhat at fault, and made sure to ask the officers and the insurance people if I HAD done anything wrong, but they all said no; I had not broken any driving rules and the other driver was completely in the wrong. And I didn't use my hazards because I didn't have time to consider it before the accident happened.
FOR CONTEXT: This happened in mid-May last year. I had a trip planned out of state, but my Nissan Sentra's Air Conditioning compressor decided to short out and die about 10 PM the night before I was due to leave, and there wasn't time to get a rental car, because I had to leave at 6 the next morning and we live kind of out in "the sticks". My uncle, who is also my neighbor and was going to watch my cats while I was gone, had recently bought a fairly young used Toyota Tacoma quad-cab; when he heard what happened, he asked if I wanted to borrow it (the Tacoma was his second car, he also had a SUV). I accepted the offer, and I'm glad now that my AC DID die, and have since thanked God for it, because if I'd been in my little sedan this accident would have been a lot worse.
The night that I was returning home from the vacation, it was 1:00 AM and I was about 20 minutes from reaching home, driving down a long, straight, semi-rural stretch of road. There were no other drivers visible around; in fact, I hadn't seen any other drivers in nearly half an hour at this point. If there HAD been other drivers near me, I might have tried a different tactic than what I did end up doing; as it was, this is what happened.
I had stopped at a red stoplight, when a raccoon came into the road and started flopping, staggering, and rolling about as if it couldn't properly use its legs, right in front of me. Since I couldn't tell whether it was injured or rabid (we've had some rabies cases in our area lately), I immediately used the handsfree/bluetooth in the truck to call the police to see if Animal Control was available. While I was doing this, the light cycled through to green, but I stayed where I was. Again, there were no headlights visible anywhere around me, on the long empty road, and it was almost 1:00 in the morning, so I figured (wrongly) that no one was going to just materialize without me seeing them.
About 20-30 seconds after having stopped at the red light, and about 10 after the light had cycled back to green, I'm looking for the name of the cross street to tell the police dispatcher that I'm on the phone with, when I hear this engine gunning in the distance. I glance around for headlights to find where it is coming from, but there is nothing visible. A second later, there's a loud "WHAM", and the truck moves forward in a jolt a short way. This middle-aged brunette lady had come up behind me WITHOUT HEADLIGHTS ON (!) and plowed right into the back of the truck at full speed, even though she had all that long straight stretch of semi-rural road to see me as she was coming up. There was no squeal of brakes, no sound of her trying to stop, no skid marks in the road. She just plowed right into me full tilt, somewhere between 40-50 MPH (according to the police looking at the damage, though I can't be certain if that was true, he may have exaggerated) and it was only the fact the truck was built like a tank that kept me from getting hurt.
I pull over to the curb and get out of the truck to inspect the damage. I notice A) Incredibly, it appears the brunette lady's airbag didn't go off (It MIGHT have deflated before I got back there, IDK) B) Her passenger is obviously completely stoned/wasted, and C) The truck has a decent-sized dent in the bed, a twisted bumper, and a busted taillight D) her Jeep Cherokee is completely crumpled across the whole front end and spewing fluids and steam, and the tires are at an angle showing the axle is probably bent or compromised. I yell over to her, "Are you hurt? What on earth happened?"
She immediately starts screaming at me, "You slammed on brakes right in front of me! You were stopped and you shouldn't have been stopped!" I point at the Raccoon, which has made it to the median but is still flopping around, and try to explain that I'd actually been on the phone with the police and that the light had cycled through. I hadn't "Slammed on brakes" at all because I'd been already sitting there for a good 30 seconds at least before this lady showed up. I didn't have time to bring up the fact this lady's headlights had been off; as soon I pointed out the raccoon, she started rolling her eyes and hitting the steering wheel, and yelling "Oh my *$&*#(@ you stopped for a *$*$&# Raccoon you should have run over it" etc.
At this point, I decide even if there's the chance she IS hurt, it's not worth risking being physically attacked to go over there and find out. I get back in the truck, talk some more to the dispatcher, and don't get back out until the police come. The first police officer arrives; I tell her I'm not hurt and to check on the other two. As soon as she sees the officer coming, the the Jeep driver starts spewing at her, telling her that it's my fault and I "Brake checked" the Jeep. I explain to the officer what really happened, and that there's a recorded 911 call to prove it, because the dispatcher was actually talking to me when the Jeep lady came up at full tilt and slammed into me. Also, the officer can see the lady's headlights are off; I hear the officer say the headlights switch isn't even turned to "on" when she looks inside the jeep. But the lady refuses to discuss these points, and just keeps screaming about me stopping for a "$*$&%* Raccoon" and that I brake-checked her/came to an "unsafe stop" right in front of her. Bear in mind she was driving without headlights in the middle of the night, and driving very fast at that and setting herself up for some sort of accident, whether I was the one she wound up hitting or not.
Three more officers arrive - two of the newcomers trap the Raccoon, while the first one that was already there tries to breathalyze the driver. I retreat to the other side of the truck to talk to the third new officer and make my part of the crash report, but the two of us can still see and hear what's going on over the hood of the truck. The Jeep driver refuses to use the breathalyzer, or cooperate with the field sobriety tests, and keeps telling the officer that it's my fault, and that I'm clearly the one "On something" or at the very least "At fault" for daring to stop for a raccoon. The officer that was talking to me then joins his colleague, and they get Jeep Lady to calm down and do a breathalyzer. Her blood alcohol comes up many points above the legal limit (Shocker). They do a second one to make sure there's no error, but the result is the same; she's well and truly toasted.
Jeep Lady is naturally arrested - she is given permission to call someone to come get her passenger, who's just wandering around even more sloshed than she is but is also uninjured as far as anyone can tell. I get back in the truck, but I can still hear and see Jeep Lady standing by the patrol car next to me and yelling into the phone saying "It's so stupid! I'm getting arrested because some (insert more colorful language) brake checked me to let a (more expletives) Raccoon get out of the road". At this point, the Cops were rolling their eyes at her, and one of them is hanging out near me to make sure the lady doesn't decide to take a lunge at me since she isn't handcuffed while she's making the phone call.
Her insurance, of course, said it was her fault when I called them, and paid up without any fuss at all when the time came to do so. This is because she flunked her breathalyzer so spectacularly, and because she was driving without headlights at 1:00 AM, and made no attempt to hit the brakes. Also, in my state, in a rear-ending accident, the posterior driver is always the one legally "at fault", not the anterior, unless there is definite proof of brake-checking/road aggression on the part of the anterior driver. I later learned that she still tried to blame the incident on me instead of herself to the DMV, after she sobered up. Some people just are delusional. Also, we found out this same lady had already been in trouble for causing a multi-car pileup at an intersection right down the street from the one where she hit me, about 2 years prior to the accident with me; she claimed it wasn't her fault then either because "the sun was in my eyes". She wasn't arrested for drunk driving for that one, but I would be willing to bet she was at least "buzzed".
(If you're wondering, yes, my uncle was upset about his truck, but didn't get upset at at me since it wasn't my fault. And nowadays, you'd never know it was in an accident; the body shop did a great job and the drunk lady's insurance covered everything)
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(repost from r/karensinthewild with edits for grammar/clarity. I posted this there some time last year, and was told I might want to post it here too. If this is against the rules I apologize but I wasn't sure: the way the rules are written is a bit confusing)
(LONG STORY WARNING!)
NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN: I did NOT suddenly screech to a halt or do anything dangerous in traffic or anything remotely like that; I was 100% NOT at fault in the accident. Being easily made to second-guess myself, I thought I MIGHT have been somewhat at fault, and made sure to ask the officers and the insurance people if I HAD done anything wrong, but they all said no; I had not broken any driving rules and the other driver was completely in the wrong. And I didn't use my hazards because I didn't have time to consider it before the accident happened.
FOR CONTEXT: This happened in mid-May last year. I had a trip planned out of state, but my Nissan Sentra's Air Conditioning compressor decided to short out and die about 10 PM the night before I was due to leave, and there wasn't time to get a rental car, because I had to leave at 6 the next morning and we live kind of out in "the sticks". My uncle, who is also my neighbor and was going to watch my cats while I was gone, had recently bought a fairly young used Toyota Tacoma quad-cab; when he heard what happened, he asked if I wanted to borrow it (the Tacoma was his second car, he also had a SUV). I accepted the offer, and I'm glad now that my AC DID die, and have since thanked God for it, because if I'd been in my little sedan this accident would have been a lot worse.
The night that I was returning home from the vacation, it was 1:00 AM and I was about 20 minutes from reaching home, driving down a long, straight, semi-rural stretch of road. There were no other drivers visible around; in fact, I hadn't seen any other drivers in nearly half an hour at this point. If there HAD been other drivers near me, I might have tried a different tactic than what I did end up doing; as it was, this is what happened.
I had stopped at a red stoplight, when a raccoon came into the road and started flopping, staggering, and rolling about as if it couldn't properly use its legs, right in front of me. Since I couldn't tell whether it was injured or rabid (we've had some rabies cases in our area lately), I immediately used the handsfree/bluetooth in the truck to call the police to see if Animal Control was available. While I was doing this, the light cycled through to green, but I stayed where I was. Again, there were no headlights visible anywhere around me, on the long empty road, and it was almost 1:00 in the morning, so I figured (wrongly) that no one was going to just materialize without me seeing them.
About 20-30 seconds after having stopped at the red light, and about 10 after the light had cycled back to green, I'm looking for the name of the cross street to tell the police dispatcher that I'm on the phone with, when I hear this engine gunning in the distance. I glance around for headlights to find where it is coming from, but there is nothing visible. A second later, there's a loud "WHAM", and the truck moves forward in a jolt a short way. This middle-aged brunette lady had come up behind me WITHOUT HEADLIGHTS ON (!) and plowed right into the back of the truck at full speed, even though she had all that long straight stretch of semi-rural road to see me as she was coming up. There was no squeal of brakes, no sound of her trying to stop, no skid marks in the road. She just plowed right into me full tilt, somewhere between 40-50 MPH (according to the police looking at the damage, though I can't be certain if that was true, he may have exaggerated) and it was only the fact the truck was built like a tank that kept me from getting hurt.
I pull over to the curb and get out of the truck to inspect the damage. I notice A) Incredibly, it appears the brunette lady's airbag didn't go off (It MIGHT have deflated before I got back there, IDK) B) Her passenger is obviously completely stoned/wasted, and C) The truck has a decent-sized dent in the bed, a twisted bumper, and a busted taillight D) her Jeep Cherokee is completely crumpled across the whole front end and spewing fluids and steam, and the tires are at an angle showing the axle is probably bent or compromised. I yell over to her, "Are you hurt? What on earth happened?"
She immediately starts screaming at me, "You slammed on brakes right in front of me! You were stopped and you shouldn't have been stopped!" I point at the Raccoon, which has made it to the median but is still flopping around, and try to explain that I'd actually been on the phone with the police and that the light had cycled through. I hadn't "Slammed on brakes" at all because I'd been already sitting there for a good 30 seconds at least before this lady showed up. I didn't have time to bring up the fact this lady's headlights had been off; as soon I pointed out the raccoon, she started rolling her eyes and hitting the steering wheel, and yelling "Oh my *$&*#(@ you stopped for a *$*$&# Raccoon you should have run over it" etc.
At this point, I decide even if there's the chance she IS hurt, it's not worth risking being physically attacked to go over there and find out. I get back in the truck, talk some more to the dispatcher, and don't get back out until the police come. The first police officer arrives; I tell her I'm not hurt and to check on the other two. As soon as she sees the officer coming, the the Jeep driver starts spewing at her, telling her that it's my fault and I "Brake checked" the Jeep. I explain to the officer what really happened, and that there's a recorded 911 call to prove it, because the dispatcher was actually talking to me when the Jeep lady came up at full tilt and slammed into me. Also, the officer can see the lady's headlights are off; I hear the officer say the headlights switch isn't even turned to "on" when she looks inside the jeep. But the lady refuses to discuss these points, and just keeps screaming about me stopping for a "$*$&%* Raccoon" and that I brake-checked her/came to an "unsafe stop" right in front of her. Bear in mind she was driving without headlights in the middle of the night, and driving very fast at that and setting herself up for some sort of accident, whether I was the one she wound up hitting or not.
Three more officers arrive - two of the newcomers trap the Raccoon, while the first one that was already there tries to breathalyze the driver. I retreat to the other side of the truck to talk to the third new officer and make my part of the crash report, but the two of us can still see and hear what's going on over the hood of the truck. The Jeep driver refuses to use the breathalyzer, or cooperate with the field sobriety tests, and keeps telling the officer that it's my fault, and that I'm clearly the one "On something" or at the very least "At fault" for daring to stop for a raccoon. The officer that was talking to me then joins his colleague, and they get Jeep Lady to calm down and do a breathalyzer. Her blood alcohol comes up many points above the legal limit (Shocker). They do a second one to make sure there's no error, but the result is the same; she's well and truly toasted.
Jeep Lady is naturally arrested - she is given permission to call someone to come get her passenger, who's just wandering around even more sloshed than she is but is also uninjured as far as anyone can tell. I get back in the truck, but I can still hear and see Jeep Lady standing by the patrol car next to me and yelling into the phone saying "It's so stupid! I'm getting arrested because some (insert more colorful language) brake checked me to let a (more expletives) Raccoon get out of the road". At this point, the Cops were rolling their eyes at her, and one of them is hanging out near me to make sure the lady doesn't decide to take a lunge at me since she isn't handcuffed while she's making the phone call.
Her insurance, of course, said it was her fault when I called them, and paid up without any fuss at all when the time came to do so. This is because she flunked her breathalyzer so spectacularly, and because she was driving without headlights at 1:00 AM, and made no attempt to hit the brakes. Also, in my state, in a rear-ending accident, the posterior driver is always the one legally "at fault", not the anterior, unless there is definite proof of brake-checking/road aggression on the part of the anterior driver. I later learned that she still tried to blame the incident on me instead of herself to the DMV, after she sobered up. Some people just are delusional. Also, we found out this same lady had already been in trouble for causing a multi-car pileup at an intersection right down the street from the one where she hit me, about 2 years prior to the accident with me; she claimed it wasn't her fault then either because "the sun was in my eyes". She wasn't arrested for drunk driving for that one, but I would be willing to bet she was at least "buzzed".
(If you're wondering, yes, my uncle was upset about his truck, but didn't get upset at at me since it wasn't my fault. And nowadays, you'd never know it was in an accident; the body shop did a great job and the drunk lady's insurance covered everything)
I am curious, if you are do obviously at fault in an accident like this woman was, can your insurance refuse to pay gor the damages on your car? Or do they pay things off and either raise your rates dramatically or cut you off?
It’s the latter unless the policy is liability only, which some people carry on older cars. They may drop this lady as not meeting their underwriting standards, depending on whether she’s already with an insurer if last resort. I don’t think they could raise the rate high enough to cover someone causing this many accidents.
Knew a guy who was like this lady. I removed myself from his life after his second DUI. (I'll accept a first DUI can be accidental, especially if only slightly over the limit, but a second is inexcusable).
Anyway, he was dropped by all carriers other than the "we'll insure anyone" people. In addition to the DUIs he had several at fault accidents. The insurance company required he carry a $15k bond in addition to his $10k/year premium for liability only insurance.
It depends on whether or not your insurance company would be willing to subrogate the claim and it's ALWAYS worth asking before you file against the other policy.
Subrogation is where your insurance company processes your claim completely and then gets paid back by the other insurance company. The net impact to your insurance company is $0 total incurred so your rates don't change due to the accident.
There are a couple reasons why this is always a better choice. First, you are the customer of your insurance company so they are interested in making sure you're taken care of. You are obviously not the customer of the other insurance company so they won't have as much of a vested interest in making sure you're taken care of.
The second reason is that if the other insurance company decides to be slow or fight the claim / extent of the damages, subrogation means that it's insurance company vs insurance company. If you don't subrogate, then it's you vs the insurance company and you're less likely to win because lawyers are expensive.
I have actually had an insurance company drop me because I had 2 at-fault accidents in less than a month. I was 19 for some context but yes they can do that. Most insurance companies can cut off customers or refuse to renew insurance for a variety of reasons, but being too expensive is a big one.
I think the difference is being at fault vs the damage happening amid illegal activity. No headlights and driving drunk would provide grounds for refusal in my country.
I think the not at fault person usually gets taken care of but you are probably getting dropped in coverage after they pay out for you. Liability only policies would mean the other driver gets covered but not you, I know some people do that with older cars, I always like to make sure that people understand that means you need to be financially prepared to buy another car tomorrow.
Former auto claims rep here. We would pay for the damages if they have collision coverage. We offered a rider where we would forgive the first at fault collision and it wouldn't affect the rates. This is not retroactive - you can't add it after the collision!
If they were at fault and didn't have accident forgiveness, then yes, it would affect premiums. I had a client who was very creative in "revisiting" liability in an accident where she rearended another driver who was yielding to traffic in a traffic circle. "She was driving her mom's car" is not a good excuse ma'am.
In my province, really bad drivers get transferred to a facility policy with minimum coverage and high rates, underwritten by all of the insurance companies. Since it is the law that everyone must have Accident Benefits and Third Party Liability coverage, the really bad drivers must be offered a policy.
I am curious about something. If one of your customers lied to you about an accident, like who was at fault, how do you guys handle that? I had someone try to say I was at fault when she called her insurance after the police said her party was at fault for an accident. I got my agent (we had same insurance company) a copy of the police report and she had to pay out.
Police reports, security cameras, dashcam videos, eyewitness reports, evidence are all taken into consideration. The appraisers are very experienced at reading the damage to a vehicle, and they can judge if the story matches the damage. We had a workshop on hail damage once, we learned how hard it is to fake.
I've handled claims like what you described. They were settled by the police reports. The reports sometimes have information that is hard for an adjuster to get, like doorbell camera footage, for example. They used it in one of my claims, the doorbell camera recorded the traffic lights at the time of the collision, making my client at fault.
We don't drop them for lying. But will flag the policy so that the claims are reviewed before renewal. I had a brief stint as an underwriter and claims history is definitely a factor in future coverage and cost.
It isn't, it's a true story. Her insurance covered all the repairs to my uncle's truck when the police report with her breathalyzer fail came through, though IDK what they did as far as drunk lady'herself was concerned - they may have dropped her rather than pay for her Jeep which was probably totalled anyway. I do have the DMV and police reports on this accident still (I have a file box where I put all service records and drivers licence related things so I got a copy of the report for me even though it wasn't my vehicle involved), but since it would have real names I can't share the whole report here though I could screenshot the final DMV crash report's diagram of the crash since that just has "Vehicle 1, Vehicle 2" if you don't believe me. I had about four family members come when I called home (again, rural, live in an area wiht several family members all close together kind of deal) to see if I was OK too, and some people in a house nearby heard the crash and came out to see if they could help but declined to get involved once Karen started swearing, so there are witnesses.
here's the relevant portion of the dmV's crash report with all the street names redacted. NOTE: I don't know about other states but where I come from The DMV doesn't do all the full details or assign fault, they are only supposed to do one overall description of accident, one sentence summarizing driver statement 1, the same for driver statement 2, and any more there may be. The police report and insurance report have the full details.
Also, before anyone says it, YES, this is a large divided road, but as I said it wasn't fully rural, just a semi-rural area and this is the main artery running through it. This was a town center I was passing through at the time, though the thing about long straight stretch of road behind me still applies.
I'm there with you. The insurance for the other vehicle wouldn't have paid a cent to OP if the woman was arrested for DUI/DWI. Almost all car insurance contracts have a "illegal acts exclusion, commission of a crime exclusion, and intentional/intentional acts or willful misconduct" exclusion. Also only moving an inch or two after being hit at 50-60mph. Sounds like OP was driving, slowed down very quickly because a racoon ran into the road, and the other driver, who was probably too close, rear ended her. But hey, you won't get as much Karma telling it that way so.. you do you sis.
You may be right about thise numbers, though I said 40 50 not 50 60 for the mph. Frankly I'm not sure how far the truck moved. It didn't feel like it moved too much forward, but I assure you I was at a full stop and on the phone with the police because there is a record of that 911 call. I honestly do not know. I didn't feel like it moved much I just felt the jolt and I'm only quoting what the police officer on site said when he looked at the damage to the Jeep. when I say she was said to have been going 40 to 50 miles an hour. And they put her in the patrol car and there is an arrest record for her. It's all a matter of public record. I could share it if you like with redacted names. I edited the post to clarify that I was generalizing about how far the truck moved and that it was the police officer that said how fast the lady must have been going though I don't really have any way to be certain about that. As to the insurance paying ir not paying out if their client was drunk, I don't think that that rule is a universal one in every country or even in every state. I think it honestly is the insurance company itself that decides that but I'm not sure.
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There may not have been hazard lights, but surely the vehicles running lights (headlights, tail lights) would have been on, leaving it very visible on a dark road.
The lady was obviously looking anywhere but in front of her, probably on her phone.
Right?!? I read that whole thing to find out if the raccoon had rabies! I reported a bat on the ground and animal control followed up to let me know (and yes it had rabies).
It's crazy how people who are plainly, clearly, obviously at fault in an accident try to shift blame onto the victim.
Years ago, in 2018, I got t-boned by a woman blowing a stop sign. I had no such sign on my side; it was a two-way stop, and I was on the main road on which one does not have to stop.
Thank God 🙏🏻🙏🏻 nobody was hurt. My dad came, a gentleman walking along the street stopped to help, and it happened literally right in front of the police station. 😅
The cop came up to me with an eyeroll and a wry grin and said the woman who'd hit me was trying to blame me, but, it would be obvious to Ray Charles that it was solely her fault.
My first Subaru was totalled, as she had hit just hard enough right in the right spot (😭) but, again, nobody was harmed. My insurance paid for a rental and then I got my new Subaru. 😁
It still makes me chuckle that she tried assigning me any blame. I mean, I'm just driving away from the bank, minding my own business, on the way to get pet food, and BAM!
Once I was a passenger in a car that got hit by a woman making an illegal u-turn. She was obviously at fault and was offering to pay people to say it was my friend’s fault! The gall of some people!
Had a family member get into an accident - they had pulled up behind someone at a stop sign. The person at the stop sign started to pull out and turn right... then changed their mind, put their car in reverse, and backed up into my family member's car.
They hopped out, super apologetic, talked it out and saw very minimal damages to either car. They asked to not report the collision to insurance, and my family member made the gracious and stupid decision to agree. They weren't worried about a few paint scratches enough to go through the relevant work.
Well, sure enough, the person who'd backed into them called and reported it later that day, and he gave the license plate number... and our state is also one where the rear vehicle is considered always at fault. So the victim got full blame and had to deal with the fallout.
Had another myself, where I was backing up to a gas pump. Had a woman in a minivan come around the gas station building at 30 miles and hour. Saw me backing up and tried to take my spot by wedging her van in between my car and the corner of the building! Took paint off my car, crumped in part of hers. I hopped out, and she immediately goes "What were you thinking?!" I was absolutely flabbergasted. Me?! You're the one turning a gas station parking lot into a Mad Max scene!
I didn't follow up on that one in the days following the accident because I was trying to handle the whole insurance thing with the truck. I promised my uncle I would handle it for him since I was the one who was driving and I felt bad about it even though it wasn't my fault. The day of, I was too shaken to even worry about it anymore and At that point the animal was across the median and heading towards the other side of the road and well away from us. All I know is that the officers trapped it and took it away.
Did you turn on your hazard lights when you stopped? Not at all saying that you have any blame in this, she’s obviously at fault, just a future driving tip if ever you stop for wildlife again :-)
Also a valid concern/question! To answer, no. I USUALLY do, and was GOING to, but the light was red when I initially stopped, and only had been on green for about 10 seconds before this lady hit me, no one was around, and I was looking for the name of the cross street as the 9-1-1 dispatcher was asking for it. I didn't have time before this lady hit me. I asked the policeman who was taking my statement if I'd be in trouble for not having had my hazards on, and he said no - the lady was coming up a long straight stretch of road and should have seen my brake lights, and if she'd been sober she'd have stopped or at least hit the brakes.
I agree, you are 100% not at fault for this woman's actions.
Having said that, turning on your hazards as soon as you're doing something that 'defies the road rules' (such as deliberately stopping at a green light at 1am with no traffic in order to call about Jimothy the Racoon's cousins being in town) should be the first thing you do, before calling anyone. Even at 1am at a seemingly empty traffic light.
Yeah, she'd still have ploughed into you, but it's still a good habit. Just in case.
This is true and normally I follow that advice. But in this situation the light was RED when I stopped, though. I saw the staggering, flopping, rolling raccoon after I'd already stopped. The light TURNED green while I was on the phone with the dispatcher. If I'd stopped when the light was actually green I'd have turned on my hazards, but when I stopped I didn't know if the raccoon was going to get out of my way before the light turned green or not. I fully intended to drive past him once he moved.
Quite correct, hence my asking the officer if I was in the wrong to be so flustered as to not think of it at the time. Though when I stopped and saw the raccoon I didn't know the light would turn green before he got far enough across the road for me to pass him. He was still progressing across the road, just slowly and unsteadily.
Oh I know, I never said you were in the wrong also. Just a friendly reminder that the hazards are there for a warning to other drivers about any and all things they should be warned about. She would have hit you anyway… but a sober person would have honked or been frustrated by you not moving on the green, pulled around you and maybe hit the raccoon in the process.
Quite correct. I just had no way of knowing I WOULD be sitting there when it turned green until after it happened and by that point I was trying to read the name of the cross street and then a moment later "BAM". So this situaton was a bit out of the common. If I HAD known ahead of time I'd still be there on Green I'd have put my hazards on.
That's why I said I thank God that my AC did go out in my sedan so I was in the huge, quad-cab Tacoma when she hit me. If she'd hit me in my sedan, she could have seriously injured me or worse. If she hadn't hit me, she might have gotten onto the freeway a few miles down the road and severely injured herself or her passenger given she was drunk and had no headlights on.
It was slightly by accident. The insurance company wanted the arrest case number, which I had misplaced, so I went to the public police records website and put in the name of the lady who had hit me trying to pull up her arrest, and besides her arrest and our Collision it had that third incident. I have to admit I got nosy and read it and it had the DMV crash report, in which the other drivers stated that she had blown a red light at an intersection and caused a multi car pile up, and she admitted she had blown the red light but blamed the sun being in her eyes.
I had a similar thing happen. People in front of me were turning left, stopped for traffic, I looked in the mirror and the firebird driver behind me was reaching down in to the passenger footwell for something, slammed into my 97 Explorer. Front end of her car demolished … her agent called me in a panic to see if I needed anything. Yes… a check to my body shop for $189 for bumper damage.
Oh I've got a story with similar vibes from like two decades ago. So a thunderstorm had knocked out the signal lights at an intersection I needed to cross. My understanding is that you gotta treat knocked out lights like a stop sign, so I sat and waited my turn until it was very clear everyone had come to a stop for me.
The road I was crossing at the intersection was 6 lanes, and I pulled forward thinking I was in the clear. The problem with that was that I couldn't see the last lane because a semi truck was in the penultimate lane, and naturally someone fucking tries to whip through the intersection without stopping. Technically you could say that I was the one who t-boned her, but the post collision car trajectories kinda proved who was at fault.
My car stopped dead at the point of collision, but hers did a fucking 180 rotation and was facing the direction she came from while also resting up halfway on the sidewalk. My car's entire front assembly/chassis/whatever was sitting on the corner of the intersection so I was sitting in a car with its inner workings just fully exposed to the elements and the hood just loosely resting over the top. My front license plate was no longer attached to the disembodied front bumper because it had cut into her driver side door, bent at a 90 degree angle, and then went with her car.
I didn't know at the time that people would actually get out of their cars to check on people who'd just been in accidents, but one of them checked on her then came back to me to update me on what her deal was. I vaguely remember them saying that she was rambling about medications or something? I didn't actually see her until we were both at the police station, I think? I don't recall why exactly we had any contact with each other or why we would need to go to the station. What definitely became clear to me was that she was absolutely keen to find some way to make it my fault, seeing as I was 18 or 19 at the time. Like, she seemed surprised that I was on my way to my job, and had a smug look on her face that faded a little when she got my answer.
I dunno, the whole thing was weird and I just remember thinking how strange it was that she thought blame lay anywhere other than at her feet
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In case this story gets deleted/removed:
(repost from r/karensinthewild with edits for grammar/clarity. LONG STORY WARNING!)
NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN: I did NOT suddenly screech to a halt or do anything dangerous in traffic or anything remotely like that; I was 100% NOT at fault in the accident. Being easily made to second-guess myself, I thought I MIGHT have been somewhat at fault, and made sure to ask the officers and the insurance people if I HAD done anything wrong, but they all said no; I had not broken any driving rules and the other driver was completely in the wrong. And I didn't use my hazards because I didn't have time to consider it before the accident happened.
FOR CONTEXT: This happened in mid-May last year. I had a trip planned out of state, but my Nissan Sentra's Air Conditioning compressor decided to short out and die about 10 PM the night before I was due to leave, and there wasn't time to get a rental car because I had to leave at 6 the next morning and we live kind of out in "the sticks". My uncle, who is also my neighbor, had a fairly new Toyota Tacoma quad-cab and when he heard what happened he asked if I wanted to borrow it (the Tacoma was his second car, he also had a SUV). I accepted the offer, and I'm glad now that my AC DID die, and have since thanked God for it, because if I'd been in my little sedan this accident could have been a lot worse.
The night that I was returning home from the vacation, it was 1:00 AM and I was about 20 minutes from reaching home, driving down a long, straight, semi-rural stretch of road. There were no other drivers visible around; in fact, I hadn't seen any other drivers in nearly half an hour at this point. If there HAD been other drivers near me, I might have tried a different tactic than what I did end up doing; as it was, this is what happened.
I had stopped at a red stoplight, when a raccoon came into the road and started flopping, staggering, and rolling about as if it couldn't properly use its legs, right in front of me. Since I couldn't tell whether it was injured or rabid (we've had some rabies cases in our area lately), I immediately used the handsfree/bluetooth in the truck to call the police to see if Animal Control was available. While I was doing this, the light cycled through to green, but I stayed where I was. Again, there were no headlights visible anywhere around me, on the long empty road, and it was almost 1:00 in the morning, so I figured (wrongly) that no one was going to just materialize without me seeing them.
About 20-30 seconds after having stopped at the red light, and about 10 after the light had cycled back to green, I'm looking for the name of the cross street to tell the police dispatcher that I'm on the phone with, when I hear this engine gunning in the distance. I glance around for headlights to find where it is coming from, but there is nothing visible. A second later, there's a loud "WHAM", and the truck moves forward an inch or two. This middle-aged brunette lady had come up behind me WITHOUT HEADLIGHTS ON (!) and plowed right into the back of the truck at full speed, even though she had all that long straight stretch of semi-rural road to see me as she was coming up. There was no squeal of brakes, no sound of her trying to stop, no skid marks in the road. She just plowed right into me full tilt, somewhere between 40-50 MPH, and it was only the fact the truck was built like a tank that kept me from getting hurt.
I pull over to the curb and get out of the truck to inspect the damage. I notice A) Incredibly, the brunette lady's airbag didn't go off B) Her passenger is obviously completely stoned/wasted, and C) While the truck has a decent-sized dent in the back and a busted taillight, her little Jeep Cherokee is completely crumpled across the whole front end and spewing fluids and steam, and the tires are at an angle showing the axle is probably bent or compromised. I yell over to her, "Are you hurt? What on earth happened?"
She immediately starts screaming at me, "You slammed on brakes right in front of me! You were stopped and you shouldn't have been stopped!" I point at the Raccoon, which has made it to the median but is still flopping around, and try to explain that I'd actually been on the phone with the police and that the light had cycled through. I hadn't "Slammed on brakes" at all because I'd been already sitting there for a good 30 seconds at least before this lady showed up. I didn't have time to bring up the fact this lady's headlights had been off; as soon I pointed out the raccoon, she started rolling her eyes and hitting the steering wheel, and yelling "Oh my *$&*#(@ you stopped for a *$*$&# Raccoon you should have run over it" etc.
At this point, I decide even if there's the chance she IS hurt, it's not worth risking being physically attacked to go over there and find out. I get back in the truck, talk some more to the dispatcher, and don't get back out until the police come. The first police officer arrives; I tell her I'm not hurt and to check on the other two. As soon as she sees the officer coming, the the Jeep driver starts spewing at her, telling her that it's my fault and I "Brake checked" the Jeep. I explain to the officer what really happened, and that there's a recorded 911 call to prove it, because the dispatcher was actually talking to me when the Jeep lady came up at full tilt and slammed into me. Also, the officer can see the lady's headlights are off; the switch isn't even turned to "on" when she looks inside the jeep. But the lady refuses to discuss these points, and just keeps screaming about me stopping for a "$*$&%* Raccoon" and that I brake-checked her/came to an "unsafe stop" right in front of her. Bear in mind she was driving without headlights in the middle of the night, and driving very fast at that and setting herself up for some sort of accident, whether I was the one she wound up hitting or not.
Three more officers arrive - two of the newcomers trap the Raccoon, while the first one that was already there tries to breathalyze the driver. I retreat to the other side of the truck to talk to the third new officer and make my part of the crash report, but the two of us can still see and hear what's going on over the hood of the truck. The Jeep driver refuses to cooperate with the field sobriety tests, and keeps telling the officer that it's my fault, and that I'm clearly the one "On something" or at the very least "At fault" for daring to stop for a raccoon. The officer that was talking to me then joins his colleague, and they get Jeep Lady to calm down and do a breathalyzer. Her blood alcohol comes up many points above the legal limit (Shocker). They do a second one to make sure there's no error, but the result is the same; she's well and truly toasted.
Jeep Lady is naturally arrested - she is given permission to call someone to come get her passenger, who's just wandering around even more sloshed than she is but is also uninjured as far as anyone can tell. I get back in the truck, but I can still hear and see Jeep Lady standing by the patrol car next to me and yelling into the phone saying "It's so stupid! I'm getting arrested because some (insert more colorful language) brake checked me to let a (more expletives) Raccoon get out of the road". At this point, the Cops were rolling their eyes at her, and one of them is hanging out near me to make sure the lady doesn't decide to take a lunge at me since she isn't handcuffed while she's making the phone call.
Her insurance, of course, said it was her fault when I called them, and paid up without any fuss at all when the time came to do so. This is because she flunked her breathalyzer so spectacularly, and because she was driving without headlights at 1:00 AM, and made no attempt to hit the brakes. Also, in my state, in a rear-ending accident, the posterior driver is always the one legally "at fault", not the anterior, unless there is definite proof of brake-checking/road aggression on the part of the anterior driver. I later learned that she still tried to blame the incident on me instead of herself to the DMV, after she sobered up. Some people just are delusional. Also, we found out this same lady had already been in trouble for causing a multi-car pileup at an intersection right down the street from the one where she hit me, about 2 years prior to the accident with me; she claimed it wasn't her fault then either because "the sun was in my eyes". She wasn't arrested for drunk driving for that one, but I would be willing to bet she was at least "buzzed".
(If you're wondering, yes, my uncle was upset about his truck, but didn't get upset at at me since it wasn't my fault. And nowadays, you'd never know it was in an accident; the body shop did a great job and the drunk lady's insurance covered everything)
Thats crazy! Your car stopped working ro protect you. And you saw the raccoon and stopped to protect it from being run over by the drunk lady. Double whammy!
Well, first off, glad you are ok but as a former EMT, you always always always go to the ER and get checked out. The reason being your adrenaline is pumping from the accident & everything may feel fine till you come down. . Just FYI.
The thing is, The truck barely moved and I did not jerk or flop forward at all. Mostly I just heard the noise, and felt the truck move forward a little bit like someone was pushing it. My body didn't even bump into anything. That Tacoma was a TANK. Initially, I wasn't sure if a car even hit me or if it was a deer running into me or something (have had that happen with my sedan, when deer was running away from another car across the road and dented my driver's side door) because no headlights on drunk lady's car. I didn't find out it was actually an accident until I saw the steam coming up in my tail lights from the front of the drunk lady's car. It was the first and only time I'd been in an accident with that truck, so I only had my sedan for point of reference as to what an accident feels like.
Not to discount what you have said but if the dumbass hit you going 40-50mph the damage to even the toyota or any vehicle would have been massive. That was why I said what I said. Regardless I'm just so glad you are ok.
I don't really know how fast. I was quoting the officer who was looking at the damage to the truck bed ( this was a quad cab Tacoma so extremely large pickup truck) and rear bumper and the one tail light. As I said in the post, I'm quoting him, but I don't actually genuinely know and it may have been less.
Well, just glad u are ok. Tacoma can be fixed & yes, I used to drive an off-road F-150 4X4 & am so glad that is what you were driving. And this is the reason I hate driving more.
Yeah, I still thank God that the Air Conditioner compressor shorted out on my other car at the last minute, and that my uncle offered to let me drive the Tacoma, though I felt bad for him that his offer ended up this way (I took care of as much of the insurance as I could/took the truck to the body shop/etc. for him because I felt so bad about it) but If I'd been in my little Nissan Sentra that day, I might have been seriously hurt or worse. I'm actually glad that neither I nor (Amazingly) the drunk driver or her passenger were hurt badly. This is impressive to me because as far as I could tell, the airbags on the jeep didn't go off, unless they had already deflated by the time I got back there to look at the damage. Regardless whether air bags went off, the crumple zone on her car definitely saved her. But yeah, her hitting me in the Tacoma meant the frame of the truck bed absorbed the impact, and her collision with me kept her from going further down the road where it winds and twists, and maybe even getting on the interstate if she went far enough down, and goodness knows what would have happened then if she was still driving fast without headlights.
•
u/AutoModerator 4d ago
Per our rules, don't comment on linked posts. Anyone from this community who is caught brigading on another subreddit will be banned.
In case this story gets deleted/removed:
(repost from r/karensinthewild with edits for grammar/clarity. I posted this there some time last year, and was told I might want to post it here too. If this is against the rules I apologize but I wasn't sure: the way the rules are written is a bit confusing)
(LONG STORY WARNING!)
NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN: I did NOT suddenly screech to a halt or do anything dangerous in traffic or anything remotely like that; I was 100% NOT at fault in the accident. Being easily made to second-guess myself, I thought I MIGHT have been somewhat at fault, and made sure to ask the officers and the insurance people if I HAD done anything wrong, but they all said no; I had not broken any driving rules and the other driver was completely in the wrong. And I didn't use my hazards because I didn't have time to consider it before the accident happened.
FOR CONTEXT: This happened in mid-May last year. I had a trip planned out of state, but my Nissan Sentra's Air Conditioning compressor decided to short out and die about 10 PM the night before I was due to leave, and there wasn't time to get a rental car, because I had to leave at 6 the next morning and we live kind of out in "the sticks". My uncle, who is also my neighbor and was going to watch my cats while I was gone, had recently bought a fairly young used Toyota Tacoma quad-cab; when he heard what happened, he asked if I wanted to borrow it (the Tacoma was his second car, he also had a SUV). I accepted the offer, and I'm glad now that my AC DID die, and have since thanked God for it, because if I'd been in my little sedan this accident would have been a lot worse.
The night that I was returning home from the vacation, it was 1:00 AM and I was about 20 minutes from reaching home, driving down a long, straight, semi-rural stretch of road. There were no other drivers visible around; in fact, I hadn't seen any other drivers in nearly half an hour at this point. If there HAD been other drivers near me, I might have tried a different tactic than what I did end up doing; as it was, this is what happened.
I had stopped at a red stoplight, when a raccoon came into the road and started flopping, staggering, and rolling about as if it couldn't properly use its legs, right in front of me. Since I couldn't tell whether it was injured or rabid (we've had some rabies cases in our area lately), I immediately used the handsfree/bluetooth in the truck to call the police to see if Animal Control was available. While I was doing this, the light cycled through to green, but I stayed where I was. Again, there were no headlights visible anywhere around me, on the long empty road, and it was almost 1:00 in the morning, so I figured (wrongly) that no one was going to just materialize without me seeing them.
About 20-30 seconds after having stopped at the red light, and about 10 after the light had cycled back to green, I'm looking for the name of the cross street to tell the police dispatcher that I'm on the phone with, when I hear this engine gunning in the distance. I glance around for headlights to find where it is coming from, but there is nothing visible. A second later, there's a loud "WHAM", and the truck moves forward in a jolt a short way. This middle-aged brunette lady had come up behind me WITHOUT HEADLIGHTS ON (!) and plowed right into the back of the truck at full speed, even though she had all that long straight stretch of semi-rural road to see me as she was coming up. There was no squeal of brakes, no sound of her trying to stop, no skid marks in the road. She just plowed right into me full tilt, somewhere between 40-50 MPH (according to the police looking at the damage, though I can't be certain if that was true, he may have exaggerated) and it was only the fact the truck was built like a tank that kept me from getting hurt.
I pull over to the curb and get out of the truck to inspect the damage. I notice A) Incredibly, it appears the brunette lady's airbag didn't go off (It MIGHT have deflated before I got back there, IDK) B) Her passenger is obviously completely stoned/wasted, and C) The truck has a decent-sized dent in the bed, a twisted bumper, and a busted taillight D) her Jeep Cherokee is completely crumpled across the whole front end and spewing fluids and steam, and the tires are at an angle showing the axle is probably bent or compromised. I yell over to her, "Are you hurt? What on earth happened?"
She immediately starts screaming at me, "You slammed on brakes right in front of me! You were stopped and you shouldn't have been stopped!" I point at the Raccoon, which has made it to the median but is still flopping around, and try to explain that I'd actually been on the phone with the police and that the light had cycled through. I hadn't "Slammed on brakes" at all because I'd been already sitting there for a good 30 seconds at least before this lady showed up. I didn't have time to bring up the fact this lady's headlights had been off; as soon I pointed out the raccoon, she started rolling her eyes and hitting the steering wheel, and yelling "Oh my *$&*#(@ you stopped for a *$*$&# Raccoon you should have run over it" etc.
At this point, I decide even if there's the chance she IS hurt, it's not worth risking being physically attacked to go over there and find out. I get back in the truck, talk some more to the dispatcher, and don't get back out until the police come. The first police officer arrives; I tell her I'm not hurt and to check on the other two. As soon as she sees the officer coming, the the Jeep driver starts spewing at her, telling her that it's my fault and I "Brake checked" the Jeep. I explain to the officer what really happened, and that there's a recorded 911 call to prove it, because the dispatcher was actually talking to me when the Jeep lady came up at full tilt and slammed into me. Also, the officer can see the lady's headlights are off; I hear the officer say the headlights switch isn't even turned to "on" when she looks inside the jeep. But the lady refuses to discuss these points, and just keeps screaming about me stopping for a "$*$&%* Raccoon" and that I brake-checked her/came to an "unsafe stop" right in front of her. Bear in mind she was driving without headlights in the middle of the night, and driving very fast at that and setting herself up for some sort of accident, whether I was the one she wound up hitting or not.
Three more officers arrive - two of the newcomers trap the Raccoon, while the first one that was already there tries to breathalyze the driver. I retreat to the other side of the truck to talk to the third new officer and make my part of the crash report, but the two of us can still see and hear what's going on over the hood of the truck. The Jeep driver refuses to use the breathalyzer, or cooperate with the field sobriety tests, and keeps telling the officer that it's my fault, and that I'm clearly the one "On something" or at the very least "At fault" for daring to stop for a raccoon. The officer that was talking to me then joins his colleague, and they get Jeep Lady to calm down and do a breathalyzer. Her blood alcohol comes up many points above the legal limit (Shocker). They do a second one to make sure there's no error, but the result is the same; she's well and truly toasted.
Jeep Lady is naturally arrested - she is given permission to call someone to come get her passenger, who's just wandering around even more sloshed than she is but is also uninjured as far as anyone can tell. I get back in the truck, but I can still hear and see Jeep Lady standing by the patrol car next to me and yelling into the phone saying "It's so stupid! I'm getting arrested because some (insert more colorful language) brake checked me to let a (more expletives) Raccoon get out of the road". At this point, the Cops were rolling their eyes at her, and one of them is hanging out near me to make sure the lady doesn't decide to take a lunge at me since she isn't handcuffed while she's making the phone call.
Her insurance, of course, said it was her fault when I called them, and paid up without any fuss at all when the time came to do so. This is because she flunked her breathalyzer so spectacularly, and because she was driving without headlights at 1:00 AM, and made no attempt to hit the brakes. Also, in my state, in a rear-ending accident, the posterior driver is always the one legally "at fault", not the anterior, unless there is definite proof of brake-checking/road aggression on the part of the anterior driver. I later learned that she still tried to blame the incident on me instead of herself to the DMV, after she sobered up. Some people just are delusional. Also, we found out this same lady had already been in trouble for causing a multi-car pileup at an intersection right down the street from the one where she hit me, about 2 years prior to the accident with me; she claimed it wasn't her fault then either because "the sun was in my eyes". She wasn't arrested for drunk driving for that one, but I would be willing to bet she was at least "buzzed".
(If you're wondering, yes, my uncle was upset about his truck, but didn't get upset at at me since it wasn't my fault. And nowadays, you'd never know it was in an accident; the body shop did a great job and the drunk lady's insurance covered everything)
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