Darienzo Trucking Corp. v. Sullivan

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The appellants seek reversal of judgments on verdicts by a jury finding the driver of the tractor-trailer, belonging to the Darienzo Trucking Corporation guilty of negligence, directly contributing to an accident which damaged the appellees. The Trial Court rejected motions for directed verdicts at the conclusion of the plaintiffs’ case, and at the conclusion of the whole case, and also refused to grant motions for judgments notwithstanding the verdicts. It is necessary, therefore, to consider the evidence, and in so doing to resolve all conflicts in favor of the plaintiffs below, the appellees here, and to assume the truth of all evidence and all inferences properly to be deduced from such evidence which may support plaintiffs’ claims.

The accident occurred in October about 6:00 P.M. on the southbound by-pass on U. S. Route 1, in Laurel, Maryland. There are four lanes and on each side is a gravel shoulder twenty-four to thirty inches wide. At the beginning of the by-pass, there is a sign showing the speed limit to be thirty-five miles per hour. There is another such sign approximately one-tenth of a mile beyond the first.

At the west side of the road about two-tenths of a mile south of the second of these signs is a Blue Sunoco filling station. North, towards Baltimore from this station, is a restaurant known as the Flamingo, and beyond that is an Esso filling station, which is about one thousand feet on the Baltimore side of the Sunoco station. One of the plaintiffs, Theron Wolfe, had driven his car, in which were four passengers, ³⁵ into the Sunoco station for gasoline, had been served, and had pulled away from the tanks, but was still some thirteen feet off the boulevard, waiting to proceed south, when the accident reached its crescendo. Benjamin Archer, one of the passengers, said that while Wolfe was waiting for the traffic to clear so that he could get back on the highway, the tractor-trailer, owned by one appellant and operated by the other, ran through the filling station out of control and hit the Wolfe car as it sat in the driveway of the filling station.

The witness said that as he was watching, he saw “the trailer make a swerve and to the outer edge of the road, and swerve back towards the tractor and the next come through the filling station.” The tractor-trailer was three hundred feet away when he first saw it; he knows this because he measured it with a steel tape. The witness drives thirty thousand miles a year and has been driving since 1914; he estimates that the truck was travelling in the neighborhood of fifty miles an hour when he first saw it. The tractor-trailer knocked down the steel sign post of the filling station which supported a neon sign and broke the air pump. The Wolfe car was damaged severely.

The trailer turned over on it and the tractor demolished the rear. The trunk part was completely demolished. Also damaged in the accident was a Nash automobile parked at the filling station. The trailer was smashed beyond repair.

Archer said he heard the truck driver’s explanation of the accident to the State Trooper to this effect: “a station wagon cut in on him, passed by him, and cut short in front of him, is why he swerved the first time, or why he lost control of the truck.” Archer did not see any vehicle cut off the tractor-trailer. Another witness for the plaintiffs, Leicester Cabey, was in the Esso station getting gas for a truck he was driving. It was parked on the outside pump near the right hand lane. He observed a tractor-trailer pass him, his attention was called to it by its speed and he spoke of it to by-standars.

He estimated the speed at some ³⁶ forty or forty-five miles an hour. He said that the truck driver, when he talked to him about half an hour after the accident, said that a taxi-cab had pulled in and cut him off. Another passenger in the automobile, Thomas Dailey, says that the speed of the tractor-trailer was approximately fifty miles an hour just before it hit the steel pole supporting the neon sign at the filling station. The filling station attendant, testifying for the defendants, said that he heard a very loud and very shrill blast from an airhorn, and described this as a horn carried on most large vehicles such as tractor-trailers.

He looked around to see what had happened because of the noise of the horn, and as he looked, the tractor-trailer and this other vehicle were some three hundred feet away from him. He saw the tractor-trailer in the extreme right hand lane and he also saw what was either a station wagon or a town and country sedan in the next lane. He was looking into two sets of headlights. He then testified: “As I said before when I looked around at this horn blowing, then I heard these brakes, along about the time I heard the airhorn . . .; I looked and it looked like these two sets of headlights were merging together...

I heard a rendering crash; it sounded like metal scraping to me; it wasn’t too shrill or loud; it didn’t last too long; the tractor-trailer come on out into the gravel driveway there and got to swinging back and forth like this;”. At this point the witness ran for safety, and then heard the crash as the trailer hit the post which was holding the neon sign and did the damage which has been described. This witness estimates the speed of the tractor-trailer at thirty to thirty-five miles an hour. On cross-examination, he said that he first heard the airhorn and then he heard the brakes, and he also stated that if the vehicles did lock, they pulled apart immediately.

The driver of the tractor-trailer said that he was coming from New York to the Quantico Marine School in Virginia, driving a White tractor with a Fruehoff trailer loaded with potatoes, and the gross weight of the tractor- ³⁷ trailer and the potatoes was about thirty-nine thousand pounds. His description of the accident was: “. . . as I was coming down the No. 1 highway, a fellow in a station wagon, it was a car in other words, pulled over on me; I blowed my horn and he seemed to move; it seemed to me he was going to cut into the filling station or off the road; I blew my horn at him; just then he got over to the front of my truck, his back end touched the front of my truck which automatically fused the wheels and run me over in the gravel; once I got over in the gravel, quite naturally as anyone knows if you run over in the gravel shoulder, it will automatically throw your truck; well I kind of got my truck straight; I had my brakes on; I pushed on the accelerator, trying to get enough speed to pull it back straight; the proper way to get a tractor straight is to start jacking on it so I had it almost straight; I couldn’t get it back on the highway; I hit the island; that automatically tore my trailer in half; then the tractor run up in to Mr. Wolfe’s car.” He says he was driving around thirty to thirty-five miles an hour. In response to a question as to whether the station wagon had actually passed him, he said: “Well, he got up beside me, when I blew my horn it looked like he turned back over, like he was going off the road in the station.” He was asked when he applied his brakes. His answer was: “As soon as the other vehicle come in contact with me, I did apply my brakes.” A taxi-cab driver testified that he was driving back to Laurel from the direction of Baltimore and he overtook the tractor-trailer in the extreme right lane and the station wagon in the lane next to it on the left.

He was approaching to pass over in the third lane, going between thirty-five and forty miles an hour. As he got near the two vehicles, he heard a horn blow and then he saw the tractor go over into the dirt. The station wagon stopped soon thereafter and the driver was standing beside it. The taxi driver pulled up behind him.

Then suddenly, the driver of the station wagon jumped in his automobile, slammed his door and sped off. ³⁸ The taxi-driver' did not take the license number of the station wagon, explaining that “I didn’t know the man had been in it or I could very easily have gotten the man’s number.” When he was asked whether he saw the station wagon pull around in front of the tractor-trailer, his reply was: “From where I was it looked like he wasn’t actually pulling around it; it looked like to me he was trying to crowd him, more like this.” He heard the horn blow but he did not hear the brakes applied. The appellants base their contention that the Court should have directed a verdict on the ground that there was no evidence to show that the driver of the truck was guilty of any negligence directly contributing to the injuries complained of. They say that the plaintiff must meet the burden of proving negligence on the part of the defendant, and in addition, must prove that such negligence was the proximate cause of the damage claimed. They argue that there is no evidence sufficient to show that the tractor-trailer was going at an excessive rate of speed, and that even if the jury properly could find excessive speed, the speed did not directly cause or contribute to the accident.

They say that the sole cause of the accident was the station wagon which cut in front of the tractor-trailer, throwing it out of control. This, they contend, makes the sole proximate cause of the injuries of the plaintiffs the negligence of the driver of the station wagon. The appellants rely on cases such as Sun Cab Co. v. Faulkner, 163 Md. 477 , 163 A. 194 , and Sonnenburg v. Monumental Motor Tours, 198 Md. 227 , 81 A. 2d 617 . In the Sun Cab case, the taxi-cab in which the plaintiff was riding approached a street intersection, favored by a