$800,000 Settlement – Red-Light Intersection Crash in Queens
T-bone collisions are among the most violent types of car accidents. When a vehicle runs a red light and drives full speed into the side of another car, there is almost no protection between the driver and the impact. Our client found that out at a Queens intersection in 2023. Linden Law spent the better part of the next year making sure the driver who caused it – and his insurance company – couldn’t minimize what they had done.
The Case
The other driver ran a red light at a Queens intersection and struck our client’s vehicle directly in the driver’s door. The impact fractured our client’s femur – the large bone in the thigh, one of the strongest bones in the body – and tore multiple ligaments in the knee. They required two separate surgeries: one for the femoral fracture and one to address the knee ligament damage. The orthopedic recovery alone took well over a year. Ultimately, our client was left with a permanent partial disability in the left leg.
The Injury
A femoral shaft fracture is the kind of injury that reorganizes your life. The femur is the largest bone in the body, and fracturing it typically means intramedullary nailing – a surgical procedure in which a rod is inserted into the bone to hold it in alignment while it heals. Recovery is lengthy and painful. Weight-bearing is restricted for months. Physical therapy is intensive.
The knee ligament tears complicated the picture further. With the femur still healing, the knee rehabilitation had to be carefully sequenced, which stretched the overall recovery timeline significantly. By the time our client had completed both surgical recoveries and the subsequent physical therapy, they had accumulated substantial medical expenses and had lost considerable time from work. And even then, the permanent disability rating confirmed what our client already knew from daily experience: some things would not be the same.
How We Established Liability
The liability case here was unusually clean, and we made sure to lock it down early and completely.
Traffic camera footage from the intersection captured the collision. The footage showed, unambiguously, that our client’s light was green and the other driver’s light was red at the moment of impact. We obtained and preserved that footage within days of taking the case.
Two independent witnesses – neither of whom knew our client – had stopped at the scene and given statements to police. Both confirmed that the at-fault driver had run the red light. Their accounts were consistent with each other and with the camera footage.
The police report reflected a red-light violation. The other driver received a summons at the scene. There was simply no good-faith argument that liability was in dispute.
Challenges We Overcame
When liability is clear, insurance companies shift their energy to damages. That is exactly what happened here. The defense insurer’s initial evaluation of the case was insultingly low – it treated the permanent disability as speculative and argued that our client’s recovery had been “reasonable” and was “largely complete.”
We pushed back on every element of that framing. The permanent partial disability was not speculative – it was documented by treating physicians and confirmed by an independent orthopedic expert who examined our client and reviewed the full medical record. The disability affected not only our client’s ability to work in certain capacities but their ability to perform basic daily activities without pain or limitation.
We also built out the wage loss component carefully, working with an economist to project the impact of the permanent limitation on future earning capacity. The insurer’s initial offer had ignored this component almost entirely. By the time we finished discovery and were prepared to try the case, that oversight was no longer something they could afford to maintain.
The Outcome
The case settled for $800,000 – compensation that reflected the full picture of what our client lost: the surgeries, the recovery time, the wages, the future limitations. The driver who ran that red light never should have been in that intersection when he was. Our client deserved to be made as whole as the law allows.
For more on car accident claims in Queens, visit our car accident practice area page or our Queens personal injury page.
Injured in a similar accident? Call (212) 804-8440 for a free consultation. No fee unless we win.