• 02
  • September
    2010

Baton Rouge car accident attorneys are following the developments of a case where a four-year-old girl, Elle Vandenberghe, was injured in a car accident when the driver of a Ford Bronco hit her as he was driving in reverse down a street trying to get to an open parking space. After a campaign by her mother, there is now a law in New York (where this particular auto accident took place) that will suspend the licenses of drivers whose reckless driving causes serious injury. The suspension is for 6 months or a year. The new law is called Elle's Law.

Heather Vandenberghe, Elle's mother, is a marketing executive, which is why she agreed to have an image of Elle plastered on bus shelters and in buses all with the text, "She almost died for a parking space."

When Elle was taken to the hospital with a fractured skull, she suffered a serious stroke in the emergency room. After four months in the intensive care unit and eleven operations, doctors told her parents that Elle would most likely never walk or talk, if she survived at all.

The man who nearly killed Elle for the sake of a parking space walked away with nothing more than a traffic ticket.

If the driver had been drinking, Heather said she was told, the authorities could prosecute; sober, he was safe from severe punishment. She called a public-relations executive she knew, and asked: What does it take to change a law?

Now New York's Governor Paterson has signed Elle's Law, declaring that drivers who flout traffic laws and seriously injure pedestrians in the process can lose their license for...

six months or, if it is a repeat offense, one year.

A recent Department of Transportation report on pedestrian safety also concluded that 36 percent of serious accidents that injured pedestrians were the result of driver inattention.

Even though she still walks with braces, Elle recently tested cognitively as an average 4-year-old. "She was able to use the plasticity of her brain to make a remarkable recovery," said Dr. Jeffrey Greenfield, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medical College. Hopefully Elle's story will help rewire the way drivers think about the choices they make on the road.

Source: New York Times "Channeling Outrage to Toughen Traffic Laws" August 31, 2010