So What Kind Of Detective Work Could Go Into My Georgia Wreck Case?

Certain cases call for your lawyer to look at not just first hand accounts, but also physical evidence. Greg Stokes explains the reasoning behind this in one example case:

A number of years ago, there was a police shooting here in DeKalb county, Georgia. And it involved a teenager–he had a fight with his mom, he locked himself in his room, she called 911. And three police officers came, and they went into the room, and he was sitting in his closet. And of course he was very, very scared by the police officers. And while he was sitting there, the police officers started to shine a flashlight in his face. He picked up a stick, a ruler, and he threw it at the officers. In return, the officers fired 5 shots. Three of them hit him. One in each knee, and one in his low back. The police officers, all three of them, said he lunged out of the closet, they thought he had a knife and they were protecting themselves.

So we had three police officers on one side, and sixteen-year-old on the other side. Who were we going to believe? Well, the county took the approach that they were going to side with the police officers. As it turned out, this case turned into a major federal civil rights case. And we took the lead on it. We brought in the deputy coroner from Los Angeles to reconstruct the injury and to see where this young man was seated when he was shot.

The CSI person came to the house, inspected the closet, looked at the bullet holes in the closet and the floor of the closet. Then she compared it to the x-rays. And what did the x-rays show? The x-rays showed that one shot went through one knee, another shot went through the other knee, and another shot went through the low back. She was able to animate the reconstruction, and she was able to show that in order for those shots to enter the body that way, the young man had to be seated in the closet with his knees up. That’s why the bullets went through the front of the knee to the back of the knee. Then the bullet to the low back came about, which was bullet #5, as the young man was falling the bullet went into his low back and stayed there permanently. Well, the one thing I didn’t tell you is, this injury was so severe, they had to amputate one of this young man’s legs.

We brought this case in federal court within one week of trial. We showed the animation. We showed what evidence we were going to present–the physical evidence from the CSI versus the three police officers– and the county decided they didn’t want to go to trial, they wanted to get it settled.

What did we learn from this? Sometimes you can’t go with just the witnesses’ testimony. Sometimes, the injury lawyer has to go deeper and look at the physical evidence and bring in experts to develop that evidence.

If you’ve been in an accident in Georgia and find yourself in need of a lawyer or just some advice, please give us a call toll-free, any time of day at 1-800-700-5050, or fill out our free, online case evaluation form here.