Peters v. City of Seattle, 32645
| Decision Date | 15 February 1954 |
| Docket Number | No. 32645,32645 |
| Citation | 266 P.2d 789,44 Wn.2d 228 |
| Court | Washington Supreme Court |
| Parties | PETERS, v. CITY OF SEATTLE. |
A. C. Van Soelen, Arthur Schramm, Seattle, for appellant.
Kahin, Carmody & Horswill, Seattle, for respondent.
This is an appeal by defendant from a judgment entered upon a verdict for plaintiff in an action for wrongful death. Error is assigned to the denial of defendant's demurrer to the evidence at the close of all the testimony, and of its motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict. Defendant contends that the evidence fails to establish its negligence and does establish the contributory negligence of plaintiff's decedent, as a matter of law.
Interpreting the evidence and all reasonable inferences from it most favorably to plaintiff, and most strongly against defendant, as we are obliged to do, the jury could have found the following facts:
Sixteenth avenue south is a four-lane paved street running north and south in the city of Seattle. During morning rush hours, it is marked to allow three lanes of northbound traffic and only one lane of southbound vehicles. There is a marked cross-walk about twenty-three feet wide, crossing Sixteenth avenue south in front of Boeing plant No. 2.
June 26, 1952, about 7:15 a. m., decedent and twenty or thirty other Boeing employees were standing on the curb on the west side of this crosswalk, waiting to cross the street. Decedent was near the south margin of the crossing.
A Boeing guard, who was a special deputy sheriff, was directing traffic at the crossing. He was standing on the east curb of the street when he blew his whistle to stop vehicular traffic, and stepped off the curb. The vehicles in the three lanes for northbound traffic stopped, and he proceeded across the street to the southbound lane. He was facing north, with his arms outstretched. He had been there several seconds when a southbound city transit system bus drove over the crosswalk, moving at a speed estimated to be from ten to thirty miles an hour. Some of the pedestrians waiting at the curb on decedent's left, and between him and the bus, had started to cross the street. All of them but one jumped back safely. This one, a woman struck the side of the bus. Decedent collided with the right front corner of the bus, on the rear frame of the door for the admission and discharge of passengers. He was thrown into a telephone pole which was a few feet from the curb, and suffered fatal injuries. He had barely left the curb when the collision occurred, probably while he was taking his first step.
When the guard left the east curb, the bus was stopped to discharge passengers about seventy feet north of the crosswalk. This guard was not always assigned to this crosswalk, and there is evidence that the guards used different signals in directing traffic. The extension of the guard's arms was used and understood by some pedestrians as a signal for them to cross the street.
The driver of the bus testified that: he did not see the guard before driving through the crosswalk, knew of the crosswalk, and was driving very near the west curb, watching the pedestrians on that (decedent's) side of the street. He did not sound his horn. Several pedestrians 'surged' into the crosswalk as he entered it. Whether or not his conduct was negligent under the described circumstances, was for the jury upon at least one of the submitted issues of negligence, failure to 'sound his horn or otherwise act to avoid the accident, when he knew or should have known he was approaching a situation of danger.'
Upon the question of the contributory negligence of decedent as a matter of law, defendant relies upon two rules expressed in Silverstein v. Adams, 1925, 134 Wash. 430, 235 P. 784 to sustain its position. The first of these is that a person will not be heard to say that he looked and did not see an object...
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