He Wrecks to Win

Oklahoma City Attorney John Merritt had a problem. He had to prove that his now paralyzed client had been going only 45 m.p.h., the legal limit, when he wrecked his car trying to avoid a county maintenance truck parked just over the crest of a hill. The defendants, owners of the truck, insisted that the driver must have been doing more than 85 m.p.h. A solution came to Merritt one day as he watched Hollywood Stunt Man Alan Gibbs put a car through a midair roll on TV. Why not have Gibbs re-enact the accident on videotape? That was fine with Gibbs, 40, a specialist in motorized mayhem whose credits include racing, spinning and virtually flying Burt Reynolds' Pontiac Trans Am in the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit.

Though Gibbs has not yet re-created the county truck accident, he has wrecked three $3,000 Chevrolet Vegas and a $4,300 Harley-Davidson motorcycle in the interests of Merritt's clients. His fee: anywhere from $2,500 to $15,000. The motorcycle case grew out of an accident that killed both the driver and a passenger after the vehicle went out of control. The passenger's family retained Merritt to sue the manufacturer, claiming that the accident occurred when one side of a poorly designed handle bar gave way and the driver lost his balance. Merritt based his argument on the cycle's skid marks. For videotaped proof, Gibbs roared around a paved cycle track, went into a long, heart-stopping skid and crashed. Harley-Davidson settled out of court for $174,000.

Personal injury cases are famed in legal circles for generating splashy, new ways of highlighting evidence. Merritt's tactic may well be copied by other plaintiffs' lawyers--when the stakes are high enough to justify the production cost. But Merritt does have one nagging concern.

Though delighted with his unusual expert, he concedes, "I worry about Gibbs sometimes. I don't want to kill him for the sake of a client."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.