Maggio v. State, Use of Houser

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. In a three-vehicle accident, two men in one truck and one man in another were killed, all the vehicles were damaged, and a utility pole was broken off. There followed suits by the personal representatives and survivors of those who had died, and suits for property damage, each sufferer of damage generally suing the others he believed, or hoped, had caused the accident. The jury found, on issues, that only one of those involved, the driver of a truck owned by Maggio and Sons, had been negligent, and awarded damages to the others.

Maggio and Sons has appealed from the judgments against it as defendant, and the widow and children of Salvatore Maggio (the partner of Maggio and Sons who was driving the truck and was killed), have appealed from the judgment in favor of the defendants in the suit they filed against the other vehicle owners. The accident occurred in the middle of a clear May day in 1957. One Schoeneman was pulling a house trailer south on Route 301 some miles below Glen Burnie, when a tire on his Chrysler automobile blew out and the trailer jack-knifed and, at an angle, blocked the southbound lane and a small part of the northbound lane in a valley between two hills. The operator of a tow truck, who came a few minutes later, advised Schoeneman not to move the trailer until the police arrived.

The two men directed traffic for a while, southbound traffic stopping ⁵³⁵ and going around the trailer. A car going south, driven by one Stephan, was directed around the trailer and, its occupants testified, immediately went back into and proceeded south in the southbound lane. There was other testimony that it remained in the northbound lane until alter it had gone a hundred yards. Meanwhile, a tractor-trailer, loaded with lumber and driven by a man named Houser, was coming north.

Some witnesses say it was going fifty miles an hour or more, another that its speed was but thirty-five. The occupants of the Stephan car say Houser was in and remained in the southbound lane and waived them over to the northbound lane, and the two vehicles passed right side to right side, each being in the other’s normal lane. Other witnesses say the Houser rig stayed in the northbound lane or that it swerved briefly at one point into the southbound lane and then immediately came back to its proper lane. In any event, the Maggio truck going south started around the Schoeneman trailer and when half of the truck was in the northbound lane, the Houser tractor struck the truck’s right side just back of the door and simultaneously the left front corner of the Houser trailer hit the corner of the house trailer.

The point of impact of the Houser tractor and the Maggio truck was in the northbound lane at about the north end of the Schoeneman trailer. The appellant Maggio and Sons says that in the suits against it the lower court should have directed a verdict in its favor for want of any evidence of lack of due care on the part of its driver, Salvatore Maggio, and because Houser was clearly guilty of negligence as a matter of law for complete lack of control of