Holiday I-10 truck tragedy leaves mom dead, dad paralyzed

Like so many families do, an Arizona family from south of Phoenix traveled over the holidays to embrace loved ones for Christmas. They had stopped to spend the night in a Las Cruces hotel before heading south to meet their relatives.

After getting their five children – ages 3 to 20 – settled in at the hotel, the mom and dad decided to make a quick trip to pick a few things up at a nearby store. No one in the family had any idea of what lay ahead in the next few minutes.

The mother and father drove on to Interstate 10 for what was to be a brief time and found holiday traffic and a construction zone created slow-going. It was then, authorities believe, that a tractor-trailer slammed into a passenger car, causing a violent, chain-reaction seven-vehicle pile-up.

“If you can imagine your worst nightmare as a police officer arriving on scene, that would be it,” said a law enforcement spokesperson of the crash.

For the Arizona family, the results were catastrophic: the 43-year-old mother was killed in the collision and the father severely injured. According to a news report, he is paralyzed from the waist down and will never fully recover.

He underwent a six-hour surgery on the day after Christmas.

The news report did not detail the events of the crash, but two 18-wheelers were involved, with one of the commercial trucks – a 2001 Freightliner driven by a 48-year-old Arizona man – believed to be the cause of the tragedy.

In similarly heartrending situations, family members decide to pursue compensation with the help of an experienced Glendale wrongful death attorney from the trucker and his employer in order to provide the continuing medical care needed for their permanently injured loved one, and to compensate for the inestimable loss of another loved one.

Source: Las Cruces Sun-News, “I-10 crash south of Las Cruces leaves Arizona family devastated,” Diana Alba Soular, Dec. 31, 2014