Dec 09 2009
Plyer Family Gets Settlement at Expense of Charlotte Taxpayers
The city of Charlotte has agreed to settle a lawsuit by the family of a Weddington woman killed when a tree fell and crushed her SUV on East Boulevard in the spring of 2008.
Kay Plyler, an assistant town manager of Matthews, was driving with her 14-year-old daughter, Taylor Yeaton, when the tree fell on their vehicle at East Boulevard and Asheville Place. Plyler was killed. Taylor suffered minor injuries.
The lawsuit contends that the tree’s roots were 80 percent to 90 percent decayed, and that the city should have cut it down. It was on city-owned land.
I admit that I don’t know all the facts about this case. Perhaps people have complained about this tree, perhaps not. Perhaps the city was derelict in their responsibility, perhaps not. Despite all of that, I can’t help to smell the stench of bull shit in this lawsuit. People deal with the loss of family members around the world every single day because of accidents. That doesn’t mean that they’re entitled to a seven figure settlement, which I imagine is what they’re going to get, just because of it. Is the City of Charlotte realistically expected to monitor every single tree on city property and be able to accurately predict when one might just fall over some day?
Two years ago I was in Oregon. I was driving U.S. 30 to Astoria on the coast. A storm had occurred the night before and on my way there I had to stop twice and wait while maintenance workers chopped apart a tree that had fallen across the highway in two different locations. If one of those trees, one of the probably millions that are across the State of Oregon, had fallen on a car would the state have been liable to pay a settlement to the surviving family since the tree was on state lands?
I’m not going to trash this family or their parasitic lawyer like I normally would do because I also find the city’s response to this a little suspicious. The fact that they settled this out of court instead of fighting it and the city arborist not returning media calls do make me wonder if the city does bear some reasonable guilt here, but anytime a lawsuit like this springs up I view its legitimacy through a very skeptical lens. Unfortunately, we have too many people across this country engaging in lawsuit abuse.
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