Chicago, IL - During a rainstorm in 2008, Hiroyuki Joho, 18, (pictured) was trying to catch a train. While hurrying towards the platform with an umbrella shielding him from the rain, he made the literally fatal mistake of stepping into the path of an oncoming Amtrak express train.
The teen’s mother Jeung-Hee Park, had reportedly left Joho, a high school student, at the station that morning. It is believed that he thought that the approaching train was his local train and that he expected it to slow down. Joho crossed over the tracks using the pedestrian crossing which put him in the path of the train.
Joho’s train, in fact, had been delayed by the bad weather and overtaken by the Amtrak express. That train, traveling at close to 70mph, did not slow down. Joho was reportedly ‘shredded’ on impact.
Gayane Zokhrabov, 58, a commuter waiting on the platform was hit by a ‘sizeable portion of Joho’s body.’ The impact – which occured after a portion of Joho’s torso had traveled almost 100 feet through the air – was reported to have knocked her to the ground, breaking her leg and wrist and injuring her shoulder.
Zokhrabov subsequently filed a lawsuit against the boy’s estate seeking compensation for her injuries. A Cook County court judge reviewing the case dismissed it, ruling that Joho could not possibly have anticipated Zokhrabov’s injuries. Lawyer Leslie Rosen, handling Zokhrabov’s appeal, disagreed.
“If you do something as stupid as this guy did, you have to be responsible for what comes from it,” Rosen said.
On appeal, the court agreed. Calling it a ‘tragically bizarre’ case, the appeals court found that ‘it was reasonably foreseeable’ that the high-speed train would kill the teen and hurl his body toward a platform where people were waiting.
So, instead of the teen’s raining body parts considered as being part of the storm, if you will… the court found that they were, in effect, the result of tacit neglegence.
Incidentally, the mother of the teen had filed her own lawsuit against Metra and the Canadian Pacific Railway saying both entities were negligent because Joho had no warning that what he thought was his Metra train was actually an express Amtrak train. The judge in that case found that the railroads had no duty to warn about such an “open and obvious danger” as a moving train, a decision upheld on appeal.
So… the bottle has stopped spinning and the family ends up being the only one that get sued.
Tags: body parts, Chicago, Gayane Zokhrabov, Hiroyuki Joho, Illinois, train
. Accidents happen sure, when I was 15 or so, I was riding with my brother inlaw (I was passengers side), I was in a car accident completely the other peoples fault. (They pulled a U-turn on the highway to see cows that were drinking from a pond on a farm near the highway) Sure it was an accident, but this “accident” caused me to almost have to be air lifted to have surgery in another part of the country, as a result of someone elses stupidity, my eyes were/are pretty messed up (ugly thick tinted glasses, can’t really go outside in the day, hell even store lights hurt my eyes. Messed up pupils, constant pain, loss of my pretty perfect vision, and I run the risk of going blind in the future..and I don’t drive, which I hate to admit, is because I’m damn scared in a car now.) I was hurt, and I had no choice. I put up a suit, like I should have. Like I needed to do to insure MY future, If one of the people in the other car had died? I would have STILL sued. It may seem unreasonable, but I can see where she’s coming from. I definitely didn’t want to sue two old people (they were about late 50s).There’s a lot of trauma from things like this along with bodily harm, when you’re hurt so badly. My mind blocked out most of it, but when it started to come back, I remembered I had crawled to the middle of the road after my father pulled me out, my face covered in blood completely, unable to open my eyes, screaming and terrified. I remember vaguely some woman holding me and crying, telling me it’d be okay,that she was sorry and I couldn’t stop crying. It turned out to be the old woman from the other car, I’m sure they’re nice people, and what I had to do, didn’t mean I was a bad person, or that I didn’t care it was an accident, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. It’s easy to say you would be more concerned about them, then yourself, but that’s crap. You have no idea what you’ll do until you’re put in a position where you really have no choice. -It may seem like she’s a cunt for filing a lawsuit, but I’m pretty sure she would rather have had it not happen at all in the first place.
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