I’ve worked on too many wrongful death cases in my career. And I remember every one of them. And I remember every one of the families. One of the most memorable was a case here in Minnesota where two trains collided at night in non-signal territory, dark territory it’s called. Two engineers and a brakeman were killed and I represented each of the three families. The horror of the families when this first goes on, of any family when they lose a loved one is so tough. And the railroad is out building evidence and collecting evidence when the family doesn’t even know what’s going on. They didn’t recover the bodies for several days. They couldn’t identify them.

What happened in those cases is they did recover the bodies and then they did testing on them and they ended up saying that all three of the railroad employees were drunk. And that’s the most challenging wrongful death case I’ve ever handled because – and all the TV stations are saying railroad employees were drunk. They even did Riding High was a series they did. What we ended up doing is we did as much medical research as we could and we cooperated with the union and they helped us, our unions. And we found a study that was done by the Royal Air Force where two of its pilots had died in a crash and there was a fire also. And it turns out that they ended up with blood alcohol levels of .50. You can’t fly an airplane with a .50. Point 08 is legally drunk, it used to be .1. There’s no way a pilot could pilot a jet airplane at .50.

And they had done the testing from the stomach. They put a needle in and they pulled out and that’s how they did their testing at that time, their postmortem testing. Well then, the RAF says this can’t be and so, they ended up taking what’s called vitreous humor testing from the eye. And they ended up proving that that did not have alcohol. What they ended up determining is that because we have sugars in our bodies if they’re exposed to heat and time, like flames, that can produce alcohol, which is how we proved that our clients were not drunk and won the case. Cases, all three of them and I’m very proud of that.

One of the most interesting parts of that case was that the FRA had, his name was John Riley at that time, he ended up introducing all these rules for testing of railroad employees for drinking on the job, the rule ____. Once we proved that these three gentlemen were not, had not been drinking, we asked the FRA to apologize to the families because they had nationally proclaimed on TV, the head of the FRA, that all three of them were drunk. The FRA said they’ll do it privately off camera.

And I said, “No, we won’t take it. It’s got to be public.” The NTSB is the only organization that was wiling to stand up. To make it look okay they had another postmortem hearing where they brought all their experts in and listened to the evidence that we had. And then they developed new standards for postmortem testing in all cases where now vitreous humor is checked instead of stomach contents. Which is a good thing so other families don’t get wrongly accused in a horrific fire situation where someone dies.