Texas Injury Law Blog : Dallas Accident Lawyer & Attorney : Fears Nachawati Law Firm : Personal Injury, Wrongful Death : Ft. Worth, San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Texas

The family of the victim killed in the IRS plane crash on February 18, 2010 has filed a Texas wrongful death lawsuit against the pilot’s estate.

Joseph Stack was piloting the plane involved in the fatal crash. Both he and Vernon Hunter, the victim at the center of the Texas wrongful death lawsuit, were killed in the suicide plane attack.

According to authorities, Stack, 53, intentionally crashed his plane into the IRS office building. Hunter, who was a manager in the IRS office, was killed.

In the Texas wrongful death lawsuit filed on Monday, Hunter’s family claims that Sheryl Stack, the pilot’s wife, should have warned others about her husband’s threatening and unstable behavior in the days preceding the attack. Stack had set his home on fire the same morning as the crash.

The Texas wrongful death lawsuit alleges that Sheryl Stack had a duty to “avoid foreseeable risk of injury to others.”

The seven-page lawsuit states that "Stack was threatened enough by Joseph Stack that she took her daughter and stayed at a hotel the night before the plane crash.”

According to an attorney representing Valerie Hunter, the victim’s wife, the suit seeks to determine whether any insurance proceeds are available to be awarded to the Hunter family. The attorney calls the Texas wrongful death lawsuit the appropriate way to determine what assets are available as compensation for Hunter’s death.

In addition, the lawsuit also seeks to prevent the Travis County medical examiner’s office from making Hunter’s autopsy public.

For more on this Texas wrongful death lawsuit, click here for the complete article.

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A Texas man is among those suing Toyota over an accident caused by the malfunctioning gas pedal that has been the subject of a recent recall.

Michael Harris has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Toyota alleging that a malfunctioning gas pedal in his wife’s 2009 Corolla caused her fatal car accident.

The victim was wife and mother Trina Harris who was killed when her car sped through a stop sign and smashed into a concrete wall. At the time of the accident, Harris was driving a 2009 Corolla, one of the vehicles that has been included in Toyota’s massive recall due to mechanical problems with accelerators.

Listed as defendants in the wrongful death lawsuit are Toyota, the manufacturer of the gas pedal and the local Toyota dealership from which Trina Harris leased her car.

For more on Harris’s wrongful death lawsuit against Toyota, see this article.

To find out if your Toyota is among the more than 2 million vehicles that have been recalled, visit www.toyota.com/recall/. There the car company lists all of the makes and models included in both of the recent recalls.

As Toyota explains on its website, there are actually two different recalls currently underway. The first is referred to as “floor mat entrapment,” where the car’s floor mat interferes with the gas pedal, causing it to get stuck in the wide-open position. The second is referred to simply as “pedal” and involves a mechanical failure that causes the gas pedal to get stuck in a partially depressed position or to be slow to return to the idle position.

If you experience sudden unintended acceleration in your vehicle, there are steps you can take to help avoid an accident. Consumer Reports presents this 5-step process for safely bringing a runaway car to a stop:

1. Brake firmly – do not pump the brakes.
2. Shift into neutral.
3. Steer to a safe location and come to a complete stop.
4. Turn off the engine with the transmission still in neutral.
5. Last, shift into park.

For more information on sudden unintended acceleration, see Consumer Report's Unintended Acceleration Guide.

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