Fid.-philadelphia Trust Co. v. Staats

• Decision Date: 22 March 1948
• Citation: 57 A.2d 830,358 Pa. 344
• Parties: FIDELITY-PHILADELPHIA TRUST CO. v. STAATS et al.
• Court: Pennsylvania Supreme Court

358 Pa. 344
57 A.2d 830

FIDELITY-PHILADELPHIA TRUST CO.
v.
STAATS et al.

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

March 22, 1948.

Appeal No. 13, January term, 1948, from Order of the Court of Common Pleas of Chester County, as of July term, 1946, No. 76, refusing Plaintiff's Motion for New Trial; Ernest Harvey, Judge.

Trespass by Fidelity-Philadelphia Trust Company, as executor of the estate of Samuel Baker Brooks, also known as S. Baker Brooks, deceased, against Clarence S. Staats, Jr. and others , individually and as copartners, trading as Staats Oil Company and another, to recover for wrongful death of plaintiff's decedent. A judgment was entered for defendants based on a directed verdict. From order denying plaintiff's motion for new trial, the plaintiff appeals.

Order reversed and a venire facias de novo awarded.

57 A.2d 831

Before MAXEY, C. J., and DREW, LINN, STERN, PATTERSON, STEARNE, and JONES, JJ.

I. N. Earl Wynn, of West Chester, and Robert E. Porter, of Wayne, for appellant.

J. Paul MacElree, of West Chester, and Franklin L. Gordon, of Coatesville, for appellees.

HORACE STERN, Justice.

The court below directed the jury to find a verdict for defendants and subsequently denied plaintiff's motion for a new trial because it was of opinion that sufficient evidence had not been produced to justify an inference of negligence on the part of the operator of defendant's truck.

At about 6 o'clock on a December evening one Brice was drividng a truck on the business of his employers, Staats Oil Company, westwardly in Paoli upon the Lincoln Highway which there consists of a concrete four lane roadway forty feet wide with paved shoulders four feet in width. As Brice approached the point where Chestnut Road comes in at a deadend from the south he was driving with the headlights of his truck on high beam, at a speed of 30 to 35 miles an hour, in the inner of the two lanes for west-bound traffic. The weather was clear and admittedly there was nothing to obstruct his view for a distance of 200 feet as he came toward the intersection. He there saw ‘a dark object’ in his lane of traffic at a distance ahead of less than twenty feet, whereupon he swerved to the left but the right front fender of his truck came into contact with the ‘object’, which turned out to be plaintiff's decedent Brooks. After striking Brooks the truck ‘slid’ forward and across the east-bound lanes of the highway a distance of about 100 feet and crashed into a telephone pole to the south of the road with such force that the front bumper, the grill, the headlights, the radiator and the fenders were badly damaged. Brooks sustained a fractured skull, was rendered unconscious, and died within a few minutes of the impact; his body was found lying upon the highway at about the dividing line between the two west-bound traffic lanes a few feet west of the Chestnut Road intersection.

Plaintiff's case should have been submitted to the jury for determination. Defendants rely upon well-known principles of law, namely, (1) that the mere fact that a collision has occurred between a pedestrian and a motor vehicle, in the absence of evidence as to the manner of its occurrence, affords no basis for inferring that one party rather than the other was at fault (Balducci v. Cutler, 354 Pa. 436,...