Opinion ID: 2804968
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Mild traumatic brain injury

Text: Second, Mr. Mathis challenges the district court’s finding he did not suffer an MTBI. He attacks the finding as “simplistic,” Aplt. Br. at 41, and contends the court “completely ignored” many facts and nuances showing that he suffered an MTBI, id. Specifically, he argues the court’s finding does not adequately address the testimony of Dr. Helffenstein, Mrs. Mathis, Ms. Waldner, and Mr. Waldner. Again, the record supports the court’s finding. Mr. Mathis’s primary argument is the district court gave Dr. Helffenstein’s testimony short shrift. A district court’s factual findings need not contain every detail of a witness’s trial testimony. Lesch v. United States, 612 F.3d 975, 981 (8th Cir. 2010) (“[F]indings of fact should be clear, specific, and complete, without unrealistic and uninformative generality on the one hand, and without an unnecessary and unhelpful recital of nonessential details of evidence on the other.” (quotations omitted)). The court adequately explained why it found Dr. Helffenstein’s testimony unpersuasive, noting he “placed undue emphasis on [Mr.] Mathis’ statement that he does not remember moving his vehicle to the side of the road,” App. at 92, and that this memory loss testimony was inconsistent with Mr. Mathis’s other testimony. That the court found Dr. Richards’s testimony more persuasive than Dr. Helffenstein’s does not make its finding clearly erroneous. Mr. Mathis again attempts to establish clear error by pointing to conflicting testimony. The evidence, however, supports the district court’s finding that Mr. Mathis did not suffer an MTBI. The court relied on Dr. Richards’s testimony that Mr. Mathis -16- did not meet any of the diagnostic criteria for MTBI, did not have memory loss about the accident, and his below-average test scores were likely related to non-neurological factors. The court further relied on the lack of medical records from the five years after the accident demonstrating any suspicion, much less a diagnosis, that Mr. Mathis suffered from an MTBI. Because the evidence presented at trial supported the court’s factual finding, we conclude the finding was not clearly erroneous.