Court Opinion

ID: 9443379
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:19:03.266517+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:28.371815
License: Public Domain

WOODROUGH, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) .
The more I have thought of the simple facts of this case, the more the wonder grows that the defendant’s truck driver continued moveless at the wheel of the standing truck during the whole time that the plaintiff’s decedent was bearing down on the wrong side of the road directly towards and finally into collision with it. It is not one of the common collision cases in Missouri where the plaintiff relied on the state’s rule permitting a finding of negligence on what a motorist in the exercise of care ought to have seen even if he says he did not see. Here the trucker himself testified that he saw the decedent running out of his proper l'ane and on the wrong side of the road when the truck and the sedan were 75 to 80 feet apart. The sedan was moving at the moderate speed of 20 to 25 miles, and if the trucker had been over near the curb line on his side of the road, or even if his truck had been in motion and tractable under his hand, he might have momentarily disregarded the movement of the sedan *584towards him when it was only a few feet over the center line of the road and 75 to 80 feet away. But the truck being immobile like a sitting duck, close to the center line of the busy road, of course it was an instrumentality of danger to any one coming from the south on the wrong side and the trucker’s testimony is unequivocal that he watched the decedent’s car the whole distance. He said that decedent had his head turned away from his driving and was looking into a lumber yard off to his left. Neither the trucker’s testimony nor anything in the record gives a hint or suggestion of any excuse or justification of the trucker’s failure to sound his horn.
It seems to me his failure to blast it was negligence attributable to defendant and I cannot agree to the holding, as a matter of law, that the blasting of it within the time he should in the exercise of , care have blasted it, would have done no good. The moderate speed of decedent’s car rendered it easily managable and I think that if the decedent was in a normal state of sound mind and body, the blasting of a horn directly in front of him would, in ordinary course, draw his attention back to his driving and cause him to swerve the necessary few feet back to the complete safety of his own lane that was wide open to him, as shown by the evidence.
I find no Missouri decision which seems to me to support a holding by the court in this case that the defendant’s negligent failure to warn was not a proximate cause of the collision. Computation of reaction time approved with sound reason in Missouri in failure to warn cases does not establish that this collision would have occurred if the horn had been timely sounded. From two to two and a half seconds travel time intervened from the commencement of the transaction when the vehicles were 75 to 80 feet apart to the collision. Allowing three-quarters of a second reaction time to the trucker to sound his horn and three-quarters more for the plaintiff’s decedent to come out of it and swerve back into his lane, there was still from half to a whole second to spare. It was for the jury. I think the trial court’s instruction1 was without prejudice to the defendant and I would affirm.