317 Mass. 573 | Mass. | 1945
The first of these actions, in the order in which both parties have dealt with them, is to recover for injury to the plaintiff’s automobile and for medical and hospital expenses incurred in behalf of the plaintiff’s wife, all as the result of a collision between an automobile owned and driven by the plaintiff and an automobile driven by the defendant in Oxford on November 15, 1941. The second action is for the death of the plaintiff’s testatrix, who was his mother, alleged to have resulted from the same accident. In each action there was a verdict for the plaintiff.
The accident happened on “the Worcester-Oxford highway,” which was straight, level, and between thirty and forty feet in width. It was dark and “kind of misty,” and “the place of the accident was dark.” The plaintiff was driving in a westerly direction toward Oxford. His wife and mother were riding with him. The defendant, who had been travelling in the same direction, had stopped to eat at a roadside restaurant located off the southerly side of the highway, and was returning to the way to resume his journey when the collision occurred.
The only issues argued by the defendant are whether, in the first action, the plaintiff was guilty of contributory negligence as a matter of law, and whether, in the second
1. The plaintiff testified that about fifty feet from the point of contact he had “gone through a green light” and had then increased his speed to about twenty-five miles an hour; that he first observed the defendant’s automobile, which was “dark in color” and “was then travelling without lights,” when his own headlights shone on the defendant’s hood and fender; that the defendant’s automobile was then between nine and ten feet away to the plaintiff’s left; that it was “moving stráight across the highway”; that the plaintiff “hollered,” applied his brakes, and turned to his right; that it was too late to do anything because the defendant was too close; that the right front of the defendant’s automobile struck the left front of the plaintiff’s automobile; that the defendant “came right across and kind of hit the plaintiff’s car on the side,” causing the latter to be pushed “some distance”; that when the plaintiff first saw the defendant’s automobile, its rear end was “in the middle of the road — across the road”; and that “the defendant was at a right angle with the road.” The defendant testified that before entering the highway he noticed that the traffic signal at his right was “red for west bound traffic”; that he observed the headlights of an automobile about two hundred fifty feet away at his right; that when he stopped at the restaurant his headlights had not been turned on because it was not then dark, but that they were on when he reentered the highway; and that by the time of the collision he had “straightened his car out so that he was nearly parallel with the center of the road.”
It seems plain that upon conflicting evidence the jury could find that the accident was caused solely by the defendant’s driving his dark colored automobile in darkness and mist without fights from the restaurant across the road in front of and too near to the oncoming automobile of the plaintiff, the fights of which were in plain sight, and that the judge could not rule as matter of law that negligence of the plaintiff was a contributing cause. The failure of the plain
2. The evidence tending to show that the death of Margaret Edwards resulted from the accident was in substance this: She suffered a fractured zygoma, and was discharged from the hospital “improved” after three weeks. Before the accident she had been “sickly” but able to care for herself, “get around all right,” and go to church. Before the accident she had lived alone. Her condition was “pretty good.” She used to go twelve miles every week to play “beano.” After the accident her condition was bad. It seemed “she could not breathe right.” She never went farther than her son’s house next, door and then had to be carried. She had to be helped from, room to room. She could not take care of herself after the accident, and was cared for until her death. She never got better. There was other evidence, however, that before the accident she had been sick for two or three years, eleven months of that time in bed; that she suffered from “gallbladder stones,” and “a cardiovascular condition,” had a systolic murmur, with irregular heartbeat, and “had congestion of both lungs”; that she had an “arteriosclerotic heart condition” for which
The evidence was unsatisfactory, but in view of testimony of persons intimate with the deceased from which the jury could have found that there was a marked deterioration in her general health immediately following the accident from which she did not recover upon leaving the hospital and which continued until her death, and in view of the definite opinion of the medical witness to whom we have already referred (an opinion which appears to have been unqualified and founded upon his personal knowledge of the whole case, notwithstanding his repeated use' of the word may in explaining it, Commonwealth v. Russ, 232 Mass. 58, 73-74), we think that the jury could find that the acci
Exceptions overruled.