Santa Monica Personal Injury Law Blog

One person was killed and another injured in a traffic accident in Chatsworth on Monday.

The car accident occurred near the 11100 block of De Soto Avenue around 6:30 a.m. Police believe that a 21-year-old woman lost control of her vehicle and collided with a delivery truck. The collision sent her vehicle spinning into oncoming traffic, where she was struck again. She was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead a short time later. The driver of the delivery truck was also hospitalized, but his condition is not known.

All drivers in California want to assume that other drivers on the road are sensible and are striving to be as safe as possible. But, as a recent study involving military veterans shows, experience can be a bad teacher and can lead to more car crashes.

USAA Property & Casualty Insurance Group found a 13 percent increase in car accidents where a military veteran was at fault. People enlisted in the Army and Marines had the highest increase in auto accidents in the six months after returning to the U.S., with Army vets increasing 23 percent and Marine vets increasing 12.5 percent.

Los Angeles readers might have heard about the ongoing story of brain injuries and professional football players. Over the last two years or so, there has been a lot of concern that football players are suffering from brain injuries at a much higher rate than the general population and so are falling victim to dementia and other mental problems later (but not much later) in life.

Recently, 31 former NFL players sued the professional football league, alleging that the NFL had concealed the connection between concussions and permanent brain injury from the players and did not do enough to keep the players safe. The lawsuit joins about 50 other similar lawsuits, which represent a grand total of 1,200 or so former athletes.

Each year, thousands of people are injured on California's roadways. Car crashes injure and kill far too many people, and what is really tragic is that many of them are not accidents; they are the result of someone's carelessness or irresponsibility.

Recently, three people were injured when an ambulance and a garbage truck collided near the 700 block of Soto Street in Los Angeles. At the moment, we do not know what caused the crash and do not have much information on the surrounding circumstances.