Court Opinion

ID: 9851629
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:16:21.673299+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:09.406040
License: Public Domain

Buchanan, J.,
concurring in result:
I cannot agree that the evidence does not make a prima facie case of negligence against the driver of the truck. The accident happened in broad daylight. The hard surface of the road was 21 feet wide. In addition, there was on the truck’s side a shoulder of dirt and gravel 10 to 12 feet wide. The truck was proceeding slightly upgrade. Its side of the road was elevated. The front of the Tolbert car was not damaged in the collision. The left front fender of the truck and the left front comer of its bed were dented. The impact on the Tolbert car was back of its left front wheel, continued along its left side and mashed in its left rear fender. There is a fair inference from these facts that the truck, with plenty of room on its side of the road, cut to the center of the road and into the Tolbert car, which was still on its side of the center and in plain view.
The driver of the truck was the only survivor of the accident. The only explanation he offered was that he did not see the Tolbert car. The only inference from that was that he was not looking. If he drove around this curve with his truck in the middle of the road and without looking to see what was coming to meet him, he was on the face of the matter clearly guilty of negligence. If there was some explanation he could have made to show that he was in fact not negligent, it was his obligation to make it—not ours to imagine excuses he might have made.
The trial judge thought the evidence showed negligence on the part of the driver of the track, but that it also showed contributory negligence on the part of Tolbert, and struck out the plaintiff’s evidence for that reason. I think that is *654the correct view of the case. The evidence shows no more excuse for Tolbert’s not seeing the truck than it does for the driver of the truck not to see Tolbert’s car. Twenty-seven feet back of the point of impact the Tolbert car began veering toward the center of the road and it stayed on that course until it came to the center of the road and the point of collision. Tolbert, therefore, drove right toward the truck which was in plain view and without any reason for doing so, so far as the evidence discloses. That act was necessarily a contributing cause of the inevitable collision. Any excuse a jury might find for the act of either driver could be based only on guess or conjecture. Verdicts must rest on more solid ground.
Miller, J., joins in this concurring opinion.