A box truck driver came through the intersection against a red light, speeding and distracted. He struck another vehicle first, then crashed into our client’s car. The impact sent her car spinning off the road and into a ditch.
She walked away from the wreck with injuries that are still with her. A concussion that developed into post-concussion syndrome, multiple orthopedic injuries, and lasting emotional and mental distress that has changed how she moves through daily life.
The driver was working at the time, operating within the scope of his employment, which makes both him and his employer legally responsible for the crash.
The Injury People Underestimate
Of everything our client suffered, the hardest to see is the one that has affected her most.
A concussion is a traumatic brain injury. The word “mild” often gets attached to it in medical shorthand, which sometimes leads people, including insurers, to treat these injuries as minor. Most concussions do resolve within a few weeks. For a meaningful number of people, however, symptoms persist well beyond that window, and the diagnosis becomes post-concussion syndrome.
Post-concussion syndrome can involve persistent headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light and noise, difficulty concentrating, memory problems, irritability, sleep disruption, anxiety, and depression. It is a condition of function rather than appearance. There is no cast, no visible wound, and typically nothing dramatic on standard imaging. Our client may look the same as she did before the crash, but she does not feel the same and cannot do everything she did before.
That invisibility is exactly why these claims get undervalued, and why they must be documented carefully through consistent treatment, neurological evaluation, cognitive testing, and mental health care. The evidence of a brain injury lives in the medical record and in the day-to-day details of what a person can no longer do.
For our client, the stakes are unusually high. She is at the start of her working life, and cognitive symptoms that interfere with concentration, memory, and stamina can affect her education, her career trajectory, and her earning capacity for decades.
Distraction Behind the Wheel of a Box Truck
The driver was distracted, speeding, and ran a red light. Each of those is a failure on its own. Together, in a heavy commercial vehicle, they are how a routine intersection becomes a two-vehicle collision that sends someone’s car into a ditch.
A box truck is not a passenger car. It is heavier, it takes longer to stop, and it does more damage on impact. The person driving one carries a correspondingly higher obligation to pay attention, control speed, and obey traffic signals.
Distraction is also more provable than most people realize. Phone records, dispatch and messaging systems, in-cab technology, vehicle data, and the driver’s own testimony can all establish what was pulling his attention away from the road. In cases involving company vehicles, those records often exist within the employer’s systems, which is one reason moving quickly to preserve evidence matters so much.
Why the Employer Is on the Hook Too
Because the driver was acting within the scope of his employment, Louisiana’s respondeat superior doctrine makes his employer responsible for his negligence. This is not a technicality. It brings a company and its commercial insurance coverage into a case that would otherwise involve one driver and one personal policy.
It also opens the door to examining the employer’s own conduct: how it trains its drivers, how it supervises them, what its policies say about phone use and distraction behind the wheel, and whether it should have entrusted a commercial vehicle to this driver in the first place.
