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Experience and Motley Collision Cases

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Again, I’ve been doing this for 36 years and from my early days, I had a chance to work on some very important cases. Way back in 1984, which is 30 years ago now I had a case here in Minnesota when I was just 31 years old of two freight trains that collided at night in Motley, Minnesota. Three people were killed, two on one train and one on the other. And unfortunately, the ones that were killed about a month after the accident the FRA, the head of the FRA comes on national news and says all three guys were drunk. And because they’d done testing and the testing from their stomach contents showed alcohol. One of the engineers they claimed had a .20 blood alcohol, another one had a .3, and it was devastating to the families, of course.

We ended up working that case and found out by a lot of work that if human beings if their stomach contents have sugar in them and if they’re exposed to time and heat that alcohol can be manufactured in the stomach. And we found a study that the RAF had done on two of its pilots where they had crashed and been exposed to heat and also had a .50 for each of them. Well, of course, you can’t fly a jet airplane with a .50 blood alcohol. So the British figured this out, we got this evidence we gave it to the NTSB, they changed the results.

We proved that our people were not drunk and we won the case. And we changed the postmortem testing nationally so that now instead of taking samples from a stomach they take it from the vitreous humor of the eye of a deceased person because the putrefaction, the manufacture of alcohol doesn’t occur in the eye and that’s a much more valid way to take postmortem testing.

Saint Paul railroad employee injury attorney William Jungbauer reflects on the Motley collision case.

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