Strip Club To Pay $10.5 Million After Drunk Man Killed Woman With Monster Truck

Nine years?? Nine Years???

There is no fucking justice.

Why yes, yes it is!

Thanks to “Nanny” laws, personal accountability is dead & buried.
As far as I’m concerned, he should get more than a measly 9 years.

WHERE IS THE PIC OF THE TRUCK?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=eric+crutchfield+truck

“According to reports, patrons had to chase down Crutchfield,..”

Why is it if this happened on CSI, they’d still need an hour to solve the crime?

It is a shame that this happened for sure, and I certainly feel you on the concern thing. That’s probably the first thing I would have thought if I were this young lady. Of course I’m usually overly cautious about anything around me as I used to ride motorcycles and just plan on people not seeing me, trying to run me over, etc. I also wonder to what extent this would have happened whether he had been drinking or not, not that I am at all condoning drinking and driving. What a shame for all involved.

I spend as much time as possible on the back of Boyfriend’s Harley, so I’m with you on the motorcycle aspect. Cars not seeing/adjusting for motorcycles is so prevalent out there that it’s almost comical how bad it is. Almost. I agree with you about wondering if this would have happened with or without the alcohol. Up that high, depending on how close to his truck she way he just might not have seen her no matter what. I also don’t condone the drinking and driving aspect of this, and am not looking to excuse him at all, but I was able to play Devil’s Advocate while reading this just because of what happened to me this morning.

I agree, but that’s actually a remarkable sentence in a country where vehicular manslaughter convicts are generally sentenced to half that.

And sadly it’s still about 5-7 years longer than he would have got here in Canada.

Lol American law. . .

yes

I resent this. I have experience working in a bar and the first thing they say is “if they appear intoxicated do not keep serving them”. Since you are making money based on getting people drunk you can’t just load em up then hand them their keys and say “go home”. I called the cops a few times when visibly drunk people tried leaving and driving home.. Refusing a cab also.

Second, on my way home from work, a drunk left a bar and caused an accident that left me ejected over forty ft onto the highway and on life support for 5 days. I was in the hospital for over a month. I still have severe chronic pain because of nerve damage in my spine. His BAC was .31 over two hours after the accident. It also happened less then a mile from the club (the highway entrance is across the street from this bar). They also saw he was wasted but got bonuses based on how much they could serve people. They also had mandatory valet and handed this guy his keys when witnesses said he couldn’t stand or walk straight. I sued him but got his max payout which did it cover the initial EMS services. So yeah I sued the bar.

I have over a million in medical bills. They can’t make money on getting people drunk then turn around and wipe thier hands when something bad happens.

Forget street legal, how the hell do you even get into the cab?

Guess he’s gonna hafta sell the truck to another dude with a big dick. Damn it!

That’s the funniest shit I’ve ever seen. How can I use it to show others how stupid they sound when they’re too lazy to do it themselves?

First off, sorry you had to deal with the injuries you had to suffer at the hands of a drunk driver. In the situation you describe, there were aggressive alcohol sales tactics involved. As far as I’m concerned, in that situation, the bar & employees should have been sued jointly & severally.
However, in the case of a responsible tavern owner that properly trains the service personnel, but the employee(s) take it upon themselves to serve intoxicants in an irresponsible manner against policy; no. The injured party should only be able to successfully sue the directly responsible party/parties, not the establishment, not the ownership of the establishment.
Hypothetical: If you warn your employees to not jump off of the Golden Gate Bridge, and they do it anyhow; should you be thrown over the edge by the legal system, also?

So a bar continues to serve some asshole who obviously doesn’t know his limits. A woman walking in that bar’s parking lot is killed brutally by a guy so drunk with alcohol fed to him by the bar that the drunkard doesn’t know he killed someone. Sounds like the bar is in the alcohol serving business and should recognize when to cut people off. $10.5 million please… although it will be contested until the plaintiffs run out of funding in the appelant phase if it gets that far.

personal responsibility anyone?

I can understand why you feel that way, and i’m sorry that happened to you. But i feel the same way as @Wolf_of_Mars:disqus.
There is a big difference between a responsible bar owner with responsible staff, a responsible bar owner who teaches his staff but with staff who say fuckit, and a douchebag bar owner who just cares about his bottom line. Any one of those three bars could have resulted in a drunk drive accident afterwards.
Now, if it can be proven that a bar was negligent by e.g. blatantly overserving somebody who’s too drunk to see straight (bearing in mind not everybody looks as drunk as they might actually be), or in your case handing somebody who couldn’t stand up properly the keys to his car (wtf?), i do believe the bar should be held partially responsible. But more responsible than the actual drunk driver, the person who chose to keep drinking, the person who chose to climb behind the wheel of his ridiculous ride? No.

Side note, thank you for making me realise i need to be thankful for our National Health Service, even with it’s flaws.

As if it would have stopped you otherwise…

how did the girl NOT see the truck coming?

Glad your friend made it! Last Friday night the president of Boyfriend’s MC got hit on his bike. He’s thankfully alright, and the poor lady that hit him must have just about died when 20 or so bikes rolled up to the scene before the cops even got there, but it was just that, texting and driving, that caused the accident. Why do people always assume the rules/laws don’t apply to them?

That is fucking awesome. I am so totally using that the next time someone asks… lol

I agree that a business owner who took every reasonable step to protect his patrons (from themselves) should be off the hook, with liability falling to the wayward employee. However, once must then define “reasonable steps”. The sale of intoxicants is dangerous business, and the owner knows this going in, so the level of responsibility, in my opinion, is a bit higher than simply saying your employees have been trained.

I believe mandatory new-hire training and competency testing (proof of training is not proof of understanding) and a regular audit schedule would go a long way. You have to go beyond training. You have to ensure your employees are operating in a manner consistent with that training.

Excuse me, but I never mentioned merely giving lip-service to the issue of training.
I do however agree that ideally, training, follow-up testing, and, regular skills/comprehension auditing should be mandated.
I’m NOT in favor of automatically giving the drinking establishment a legal pass, unless they can provide some sort of proof that they’ve properly trained the employees to act in accordance with the state laws & common sense.

Pete might be St Peter, i.e. The Pope? People might prefer it to the borderline blasphemous “For the love of God!”.

You’re excused. I didn’t mean to suggest you were giving lip-service, I was simply expounding upon your premise.

I just don’t get the name. Is there some innuendo I’m missing or double meaning? That’s what I was stumped about.

What about the rhino part?

Ehh… fatasses with dildos?

Taking “I’d hit it” to a whole new level. Sorry that was in poor taste.

It is that. I prefer places with names that are straight forward, especially titty bars. My favorite one is in Fort Worth on the way to Texas Motor Speedway. It’s called T&A.

Bars are in the business of drinking. Should they carry some blame? Maybe, but: how do they know who is driving, and who is getting a cab/ride/party bus/walking/biking(even though that is illegal in some states) or other wise NOT driving? Is my sobriety their responsibility? No. It’s mine, and mine alone. And I have learned this after many a night, blaming someone ELSE for my drunkenness.

NOT ME!

Bars are in business. Business – ALL business – has liability. When your business is making people temporarily retarded, you’re obligated to look after them to some degree.

I get the personal responsibility thing. But the reality of the situation is that people are not responsible. And this is nothing new. In fact, drunk driving rates are down from decades ago, when people were all super personally responsible in some people’s opinion. The reason they’re down is one part education, one part social programs that encourage alternative transportation, and one part legislation that increased accountability for both drinkers and their suppliers alike.

Have you ever had outpatient surgery? In my experience, they emphasize well before the surgery that you MUST have someone to escort you home because you will be affected by the anesthesia well after you wake.. This is because, if they simply handed you your keys as soon as you woke up and you wrecked, they’d lose their ass in a lawsuit like this.

Why should those who facilitate a trivial activity like drinking (which I love to do) carry less liability than those who perform vital services like surgery? Or should anesthesia patients be on their own?

They don’t give you back your keys. They give you back your clothes. I had to drive home 35 miles after dusk, after having my eyes dilated at the ophthalmologist once. Once was all that took, and I was never warned about driving in that condition. Nothing like driving while blind during I-95, S. FL rush-hour traffic… Yee-Haw!

I have something here called Strawberry Rhino. Is pretty good.

No, they’d probably BE that patient, and be pissed off that you were ‘infringing on their personal freedoms’ by not letting them enter a weapon and shoot it haphazardly down the road.

hey baby…whats aaa going on?

More responsible than the actual drunk driver? No. But in legal terms of joint and several liability if it the jury decides the drunk is 99% at fault and the bar 1% then award the plaintiff 10 million they will go after the guy and get all they can then the bar is responsible for the remainder.

My Chevy Blazer is just a little bit lifted as I use I for plowing in the winter months. I’m super paranoid when I back up and drive it down the driveway backwards like Sonny in A Bronx Tale. You have to be super vigilant, sober when driving something that big.

The thing I see in bars is a person gets cut off, they turn right around and have no problem getting someone to buy them another drink and a shot.

the earth isn’t big enough for this trucks ball sack… lol

That’s my question! Rope ladder?

I worked as a bartender, and there were -penalties- where I worked if you over-served and let the guy get in a car. Law demands we know how our customers are getting to their destinations, because alcohol removes a -lot- of the customer’s ability to say what’s right, whereas we stay sober. Bartenders forget that it’s not the tips of the single night visit that matter; it’s the repeat business that keeps you in the black. If your bar gets a reputation, the police start camping in your parking lot, and your customers learn that you cannot be trusted, because you are the ones letting them indulge that stupid side that can ruin their lives when all they wanted was to dance and maybe schmooze a little without feeling like a weirdo.

No owner should ever push sales if they want to continue running a business. Every owner I ever worked for pushed service. People don’t drink because they want to kill mothers in front of their 3 kids in the backseat. They drink because they’re out to have fun, to relax and breathe. If I let them drink until they fell down, and then not even the bouncer took notice of my mistake trying to pull his truck out of a space by driving through the sedan in front of it, hell yeah that bar would be liable. And so would I.

Anyway, TLDR, Good on you for fighting for recompense. This isn’t a nanny state issue, this is cut and dried liability.