A Story from Utah County…

In the workplace we don’t always know why we get assigned certain jobs.
Best not to ask too many questions and just get the job done is what I think.
(Maybe it’s because I was an English major at the University of Utah, or because I worked in local TV years ago. Who knows?)

Anyway, NedandMitch asked me to lend a hand on some of the cases here. Make sure we get the human side of the story. Not just the legal facts but what has happened in the lives of our clients.

Our clients have problems bigger than they can solve themselves. That’s where we come in. They let us help them. We help shoulder their burdens.

This is one of the first cases I worked on. We went to a home in Utah County with our tripod & our HD Panasonic. We let them talk all afternoon. Here’s the story.

The driverwas distracted and hadn’t slept well the night before. He didn’t remember much about the accident.  He fell asleep and ran head on to a mid-size car with a family inside.

The whole family were critically injured. I focused my attention on their daughter, a pretty young girl, ten years old with sparkling eyes who still wakes up screaming in the night. Her mother comforts her and rocks her back to sleep when that happens.

She was severely injured in this accident. The seatbelt, meant for an adult, tore across her mid-section, ripping it open. Her stomach and intestines spilled out onto the car seat. The paramedics shielded her from view and carefully, carefully extracted her from the wreckage. Her stomach and intestines were later re-sectioned and repositioned. She spent months in a children’s hospital. She lived, but she had a tough time of it and her parents thought they might lose her. Her mother was devastated by her daughter’s injuries and wished it had happened to her, not her daughter, not her child.

She has a long, wide nasty looking red scar from her sternum to below her navel. The pictures of the long, severe scar are disturbing and I won’t show them here. But I wanted to disturb the trucking company. They needed to see what their driver had done. She wasn’t just a name on a claim form to me.

As happy as she was with us, an occasional sadness would move across her face, but she would brush it away with a giggle and a shrug. She could finally take dance classes again and that was all that mattered to her now.
The doctors believe her reproductive organs are intact, so that’s a blessing for her when she is grown.

No little girl should have to suffer as she did.

This was the thank you note she gave me for the video story we assembled on her family.

Thanks for the read,
Valerie