Klan v. Security Motors, Inc.

Sloan, T., delivered the opinion of the Court. The appellee, Security Motors, Inc., was the owner of a taxicab in which the appellant, Oscar Elan, was injured while a passenger, about 2.30 o’clock on the morning of November 30th, 1929. Suit was brought, and at the conclusion of the plaintiff’s case the defendant offered a prayer for an ¹⁹⁹ instructed verdict, which was granted, and from the judgment in favor of the defendant this appeal was taken. The only question is the legal sufficiency of the evidence to sustain the charge of negligence against the appellee’s agent and driver, E. W. Witt.

According to the appellant’s testimony, he had been to his wife’s parents’ on the night of November 29th. About 2 o’clock he left his wife and two children there, and went to the corner of Eremont Street and the Washington Boulevard in Baltimore, where he engaged the appellee’s driver to take him to his home on East Preston Street. He fell asleep while riding north on Paca Street, and when he awoke he was at the Maryland General Hospital. The car in which he was riding had had a collision with a Ford roadster at the intersection of St. Mary and McCulloh Streets.

After being treated at the hospital, where it was found that his left wrist was broken and he had sustained some other injuries, he was driven to the scene of the accident by the superintendent of the taxicab company, where he saw the taxicab in which he had ridden- on the sidewalk on the east side of McCulloh Street, about five or six feet south of St. Mary Street, and a Ford car standing at the northeast comer of the streets. The only other evidence offered on behalf of the appellant was the report of the accident made by the driver, Witt, to the commissioner of motor vehicles, from which it appears that “after the accident he stopped and took the injured man to the hospital; that at the time of the accident his speed was about twenty miles per hour; that he was bound east on St. Mary Street, when a Ford roadster * * * bound south