This little girl needed a trial lawyer.
She was four and went to preschool with my kids. Tiny for her age and quiet and a little shy, she'd been at my house to play recently. It had gotten really warm that afternoon, and I'd given her a little top and shorts of my 2-year-old daughter's to wear while she ran around outside in the sunshine. I'll call her Katie.
One of my best friends was picking Katie, her brother and my friend's own two children up from preschool one day. It was right before Easter. The kids had gone to see the Easter Bunny at the mall that day. Katie's face was painted with a little rabbit nose and whiskers. The kids all had their Easter baskets with them, one more thing to try to get in the car with the four little preschool kids.
Mothers know how hectic it is to try to herd four preschoolers and all their stuff safely into a car.
This mother had a van, one that's mass-produced and driven by mothers everywhere in the US, even today. I don't know if the automaker ever fixed the defect or not.
You see, they make cars with defects, and people die because of them. The automakers keep making the cars that way, figuring it's cheaper to pay the claims than to change the way they make the cars.
They call them acceptable losses.
They keep making cars with the defects until the losses get big enough that it gets cheaper to fix the automobiles than to keep paying claims for those acceptable losses, and the people who make them do that is trial lawyers. The government doesn't do it. The companies don't do it themselves.
Lawsuits and hurt Americans and lawyers make companies do this.
On this day in April, my friend walked out to the van with the four kids. She's not absolutely clear on the next part, but I am, just because I'm a mother and I herded kids into a van for nine years. (In fact, my van was made by the same company as her van. Very scary thought.)
I firmly believe my friend had the keys in her front pocket, where I'd seen her tuck them thousands of times upon getting out of her van. She came to the parking lot, opened up the sliding door on the passenger side of the van. (This was more than ten years ago. All the sliding doors on vans were on the passenger side.)
She started getting kids into her van. She also opened the front passenger side door, because one kid would sit there. (Pre-airbag days.)
Katie was sitting in the front seat that day, two boys and a girl in the middle seat and the back.
Another mother came along, her van next to my friend's, her kids already loaded onto the other side. They stood in the doorway to their vans talking for a moment while the kids got settled. Talking about a sale on children's clothes somewhere.
And while they stood there, one of the little boys, no more than two, walked up to the front of the van between the two seats and pulled on the big handle that puts the van in gear.
And the van came out of gear and started rolling backward in the preschool parking lot.
My friend was in the doorway, felt it immediately, somehow managed to jump into the van and shove her way into the driver's seat and stop the van. She was moving so fast and with such urgency that she broke either the arm or the leg of the two-year-old boy standing between the seats, the one who'd pulled the van out of gear. It was twenty minutes or so later in all the confusion before they even knew she'd broken one of his limbs. They just thought he was crying because he was scared, and he wasn't the only one crying. Lots of kids were.
At the moment my friend stopped the van, she was so relieved, her heart pounding, but she was smiling to the other moms in the parking lot. After all, she'd gotten in and kept the van from rolling backwards.
She looked up and saw that the other moms did not look relieved. They were stricken, freaking out, trying to cope with what was going on and help their children do the same.
Katie had been half-in, half-out of the front passenger door when the van started rolling. The movement knocked her off balance, and she fell out onto the pavement and was... not quite run over by the van. More dragged along with it by the tire as it rolled.
She was rushed to the hospital with massive internal injuries. They stabilized her as best they could here in town (and we have a Level One trauma center, otherwise she surely would have been dead) and then, although they only gave her a 10 percent chance of surviving the trip, doctors here decided her only chance was to get to a hospital with a pediatric ICU. The only one in the state was four hours away by car.
They took her by helicopter. She left with us having heard that news -- 10 percent chance she'd make it there alive -- and we all started to pray, because there was nothing left to do.
My friend, who was driving the van, aged 10 years overnight. I know the phrase is terribly cliche, but it actually happens to people. I saw it with her. Overnight, she was different, every bit of the trauma stamped onto her face.
By some miracle, Katie arrived alive at the Pediatric ICU, where she spent 6 weeks, her organs so traumatized and swollen that she spent days with her intestines and other organs taken out of her body and wrapped up in protective material, lying on the outside of her skin, because there wasn't enough room inside her for all of them. They were too swollen. Leaving them inside of her would have meant they'd be crushed.
Her lungs were crushed, too, and hardly working, and they put her on an ekmo breathing machine, something that's used on premature babies whose lungs aren't formed enough to supply them with oxygen.
She got septic shock, and we were told once again that the parents had been told to plan the funeral, it was over, she wouldn't survive this.
I sat in my house, praying, looking at the shorts and top she'd worn that day she came to play, looking at my own daughter's body and thinking, This is how tiny Katie is. This is how tiny she might be when she dies, and I'd look at my own daughter and try not to imagine losing her.
But Katie didn't die. Somehow, six weeks later, she was out of ICU. Scarred and with lingering medical issues, but alive. You can still see the track marks from the gravel in the parking lot, where it imbedded in her thighs, as she was dragged along, but she is alive and we're all grateful.
This is where the lawyer comes in.
As you can imagine, there were medical bills. There was an attempt to blame my friend for leaving the keys in the van, leaving the van's ignition on or one of the kids turning the ignition on and then pulling the van out of gear, so it would roll.
Because the van wouldn't have come out of gear without the keys being in the ignition. The cop first on the scene told my friend that, and in her shock and horror, she believed him at first, believed she must have put the keys in the ignition.
I never did. To believe him, you'd have to accept that an experienced mother with four little kids and all their stuff walked them to the parking lot and went to the driver's side of the van to unlock her door first and put her keys into the ignition, then herded the kids to the other side of the van, opened the kids' doors and helped them into the van, and then intended to go back to her side and get in, to drive away.
No mother would do that. You put the kids in first, because you want them out of the parking lot, because you think they're safer inside the van.
Anyway, much later in the process, the automaker admitted or the trial law found out that the piece that was supposed to keep the van from being pulled out of gear when the keys were not in the ignition was very tiny, a 50 cent piece, and maybe not adequate for the job.
Because other vans made by this company had come out of gear when they shouldn't have. Other kids had been hurt. Other kids had died. And the company knew. They'd paid the claims.
They'd written them off as acceptable losses.
My friend was there months later when, at the order of the court, the van's steering column was taken apart, while someone videotaped it, and that little 50-cent part came out into the mechanics hands. She said the mechanic as almost sick when he saw it, saw how flimsy it was, knew what that part looked like on other vehicles. Knew it shouldn't have been this way.
I don't know what the settlement was in this case, except that I believe Katie's medical bills were covered. Hopefully not just at the time, but for future surgeries we were told she'd eventually need. They said at the time, she'd be infertile -- too much internal damage -- and I don't know if, given what the technology will be when she's a grown woman, that will be true or not. Or what other damage remains.
And I don't know if this accident or others like them caused the auto maker to fix that part on the van. If Katie's accident was enough. And I promised my friend I would never talk about this and mention any specifics. So I won't tell you the maker of the van.
But I hope Katie's accident was enough. I wish she had a terrific, fire-breathing, outraged lawyer, and that company paid through the nose. Paid enough to never want to risk hurting another child because of that little defect again.
Yeah, some lawyers chase ambulances and run up legal costs for us all. I know that.
But some of them protect us from big companies. Big companies who don't give a damn about us or our kids or their safety. Big companies who will screw us over all day and all night long, just to make a few more bucks. Think about Kaiser and that poor girl denied a transplant. I hope her family has a great lawyer. I hope they win enough money from Kaiser to scare the shit out of them the next time they think about denying anyone a transplant. I hope its enough to scare any health insurance company thinking of denying anyone a transplant.
Government doesn't stop companies like Kaiser or this auto maker. It should, but it doesn't.
Lawyers who win big settlements for people whose lives have been devastated are what stops them.
And if you've read John Edwards book, FOUR TRIALS, you know that he was that kind of lawyer. I'm not saying all trial lawyers are good, but I'm saying some of them are. Some of them make our world safer. Like a strong, free press keeps government honest, if that press is doing its job. Trial lawyers keep big companies honest, if they're doing their job right.
So I don't think any less of John Edwards when people try to dismiss him as a trial lawyer, like those are dirty words. I'm thankful for the kind of trial lawyer he was and how hard he fought. I'm happy knowing he knows how to fight that way.
I think about my friend's little girl, Katie. And I think about getting in a car, especially a van, and hope I'm safe and my kids are safe.